by Amy Reece
“Let’s all go back to my house and watch cheesy horror movies,” suggested Tara. “I rented Thankskilling about a giant turkey who starts to kill everyone. It’ll get us in the mood for Thanksgiving next week. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“Oh, man. I would love nothing better. Maniacal turkeys are so much fun, but I’m dragging Jack to Veronica’s party, at least for a little while,” I explained.
“Oh, shit,” said Tara. “I forgot you were torturing yourself like that. Well, do you want us to watch the other movie I rented, Black Sheep, first? It’s about a genetic experiment gone bad and crazed sheep start killing people all over New Zealand. We could totally save Thankskilling for the late-night feature.”
I looked to Jack for an opinion. He smiled wryly and said, “It really seems like Ally’s got her heart set on the maniacal turkey, so I’m going to have to defer to my lovely lady here and say save Thankskilling for when we get there. I can personally guarantee that we will spend as little time at the popular kids’ lame party as possible.”
“That is the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” I replied in an over-the-top drama voice. “Oh, Jack, take me now,” I suddenly had a southern accent as I laid myself across his lap, pizza crust still in my hand.
“Why, Miss Scarlett, I think I will,” he said and leaned down to kiss me. Right before his lips were on mine he said, “Take you to the party, that is.” He lifted me up and helped me on with my jacket. “If you can tear yourself away from your pizza, we can get this over with.”
***
Veronica lived in a McMansion, of course. I’ve heard her stepfather is a high-priced divorce attorney, so that totally makes sense. I prefer older, more historic houses that have some character. Jack found a spot well down the street and we walked hand-in-hand into the house. The party was in full swing and was very well attended. There was loud music playing and dancing seemed to be the main activity, at least in the living room. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about teen parties. This was not a scene out of a 1980’s John Huston movie where sex-crazed teens completely trash a house. Everyone here seemed to be minding their own business and behaving themselves, at least on the surface. We walked through to the kitchen and found an impressive spread of snacks and soft drinks. Veronica was filling a chip bowl.
“Hey, Ally.” She stopped to rush over and give me a hug. I met Jack’s amused eyes over her shoulder. “You made it.” She let me go and turned to Jack. “And I see you guys made up. Well, if you two want to be um, private, I’m sure you can find an empty bedroom upstairs. Food and drinks are right here; help yourself. There’s goodies of all kinds out in the garage.” She raised her eyebrows knowingly. “You want me to get you a beer, Jack?” she purred and sidled up to him.
“No thanks,” Jack said coldly and moved closer to me.
Scratch my earlier comment. This was exactly like an 80’s John Huston movie, only with fewer shoulder pads. I inserted myself between Veronica and my boyfriend, ostensibly to pour a Coke. I got a whiff of Veronica’s breath as she laughed.
“Oh, my God, Veronica! Have you been drinking?” I put my hands on her upper arms and shook her slightly.
“What is your problem?” She tried to shake me off, but I was like a mongoose with a cobra. “It’s a party! Of course I’ve been drinking. That’s what you do at parties, except you guys, apparently.”
“Yeah, but you’re pregnant! You’re not supposed to drink when you’re pregnant! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Shut up!” she said abruptly. “No, I’m not! God, why would you say that?” Her eyes began darting around nervously, seeing if anyone was close enough to have heard our conversation.
I decided to try a new tactic. I let her go and said softly, “Hey, it’s okay, Veronica. I know. Remember in the nurse’s office? You were asking all sorts of questions about prenatal care? I know about the pregnancy. It’s all right, I won’t tell anyone.”
She looked at me with abject terror in her eyes. “I was talking about a friend. It’s not me. I’m not pregnant. Get the hell away from me!” She turned and stalked out of the kitchen.
I looked at Jack, biting my lip. “Well, that went well.”
He reached past me and finished pouring the Coke. “This party sucks,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Come on, let’s see if we can find Long Duk Dong here somewhere.”
He chuckled, enjoying my Sixteen Candles reference. “You can be Molly Ringwald.”
Twenty minutes later, Jack and I were slow dancing in the living room and making plans to blow off the rest of the party as soon as possible, when I suddenly remembered that I wanted to ask him about the crude joke the girls had been laughing about yesterday at the pep rally. “Jack,” I said, looking up at his gorgeous face. “I need you to explain something to me.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Well, I heard something I didn’t understand. It’s probably dirty, but I felt really stupid not getting it.” I told him about the ‘big man with a really little man’ joke I had overheard.
He smiled and pulled me back into his arms. “Oh, Ally. You are so beautifully innocent, sweetheart. I don’t really want to tell you.”
“Oh, come on, Jack. I don’t want to feel like such a baby around these girls. Please tell me.”
“Fine, but I feel like I’m ruining you or something. They were talking about the size of a guy’s…well, dick. It’s a kind of old wives’ tale that really big guys have small…you know.”
“Really? I’ve never heard that before. Is it true?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. I certainly haven’t asked any of the big guys I know. Nor do I plan to. I have heard that steroids can do that to a guy, though.” We continued dancing quietly for a few minutes. “Does that satisfy your intense curiosity?”
“Yeah. Thanks for telling me. I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”
“Nah. Ally, I want us to be able to talk about anything. Even if it embarrasses us a bit. I want us to have a really strong relationship, querida.” He leaned down to kiss me.
I reveled in his kiss for a moment, the way he caressed my jaw gently while stroking his tongue across my lips and into my mouth, but he soon pulled away and we just danced. As the song changed, I stiffened in his arms, suddenly swept into a vision I was completely unprepared for.
I was leaning against something, no, wait…Veronica was leaning against something. It was so hard to tell…I felt like I was there. She/I was opening a bottle of pills, but her hand was shaking so much she was having difficulty opening it. I tried to tell her no, not to do this, but I couldn’t make a sound. She finally got the bottle open and shook a handful of little orange pills that had x’s on the back. She started popping them into her mouth, washing them down with water as fast as she could. A few spilled onto the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice as she sunk down to the floor.
“We need to find Veronica. Now!” I gasped. I was having a hard time staying on my feet; I needed to sit down but I knew I couldn’t spare the time.
“What?” he asked, holding me by the shoulders, a troubled look on his face. “What did you see, Ally?”
“She took some pills. A lot of pills. We need to find her, fast!” I tried to remember what the room looked like that she was in, but I was in full panic mode and couldn’t think straight. We checked the garage first, thinking that would be the logical place for her to take any drugs. All we found was a group of jocks, including Veronica’s boyfriend, Daniel, who was smoking a joint. Seeing them there, sitting all together, it struck me again how huge they all looked. They were really muscular, with thick necks and bulging biceps. When had that happened? I had been going to school with all of them for years and had classes with some of them up until last year. None of them were in any of my classes this year, and they’re not at all the type of guy I keep tabs on, but you would think I would have noticed these body builders walking around school. Something about this bothered me, but I coul
dn’t quite put my finger on it. Nor did I have the time right now. “Daniel, where’s Veronica?” I asked, waving away the sickly sweet smoke near him.
“Man, I don’t know,” he said, taking another hit. “She’s probably off crying somewhere. All she does anymore.”
Although I wanted to stay and give him a piece of mind and/or shove that stupid joint where the sun don’t shine, I knew we didn’t have the time. “Daniel, this is really important! Do you know where she might be?” He continued smoking the joint.
Jack stepped forward, a disgusted look on his face. “Dude, your girlfriend is in trouble! What is wrong with you?”
Daniel’s reaction surprised us both, I think. His face turned absolutely purple with rage and he was actually trembling as he stood up, threw the joint down, and started for Jack. “What the hell is your problem?” he yelled, his fists balled up and the veins in his biceps bulging.
I quickly stepped in front of Jack, thinking…well, I really don’t know what I was thinking. Danny was apparently not averse to hitting a girl, because he didn’t even pause. If Jack hadn’t pushed me out of the way and blocked Danny’s fist with his forearm, I would have had a nice black eye, or worse. “Jack, no! Don’t hit him! Danny, stop! We’re not trying to start a fight! We’re trying to find Veronica!” Both of them stood, tense and staring into each other’s face, for a moment. Finally, Danny took a breath and visibly deflated.
“Sorry, man. I didn’t mean it.” He shook his head, as if he was confused by what he had done.
I grabbed Jack’s hand, saying, “Come on. She’s not here. Let’s check upstairs.”
We ran up the stairs and began checking in each bedroom we came to. Most were empty; couples were in a few. Gross—I saw way more of Todd Snelling and his girlfriend than I ever wanted to see. We finally tracked her down in the master bathroom. She was leaning against the jetted tub, knees to her chest, sobbing. A chill went through my entire body when I saw, lying on the floor at her feet, an empty prescription bottle. I turned to Jack. “Call 911,” I ordered. He backed out of the bathroom to call.
“Veronica?” I crawled next to her. “Hey, um, are you all right?” Of course she wasn’t, but I didn’t know what to say.
She looked up at me through bleary, red eyes. “Ally? Why are you here? Leave me alone.” She put her head back down on her knees, but the sobbing had slowed down some.
“I can’t do that, Veronica. I want to help you. Did you take all those pills?”
She nodded.
“What were they?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Who cares? Probably some of my mom’s sleeping pills. She takes them so she doesn’t have to deal with my step dad. Makes me deal with him.” Her face crumpled as she said this. “Well, I wanna sleep, too. I’m so tired. Tired of it all. I just wanna sleep.” She slumped farther down, now lying fully on the floor. “Go away, Ally.” Her speech was starting to sound slurred.
“Jack! We need that ambulance!”
He came back into the room, still talking on his cell. “Yeah, she’s still conscious, but barely. You better hurry,” he said.
I leaned over Veronica, her pretty face streaked with mascara. “How did you know?” she whispered. “I didn’t tell anyone. How did you know?” I could barely hear her last whisper as she lost consciousness. I looked up at Jack, horrified.
“Look, she passed out,” he said into the phone, holding it with his chin against his shoulder as he wet a washcloth from a basket on the counter and handed it to me. “They’re here,” he said, hanging up the phone. “I’m going to go down to meet them.”
Within minutes, the paramedics were assessing her and loading her on a stretcher. Partygoers were crowding the hallway, making it difficult for the paramedics to get her out. Jack took command, clearing the way for them. I grabbed hold of Daniel’s arm before he could follow her out and pulled him back into the master bedroom.
“What happened?” he asked, clearly freaked out.
“While you were down in the garage getting high, your girlfriend was up here trying to kill herself!”
“What?”
“She took a bunch of pills. Now you better figure out how to get hold of her parents and tell them to meet you at the hospital.” He stared at me, obviously still feeling the effects of the weed. “Now!” I shouted. I watched while he fumbled with his cellphone, trying to find a phone number for one of Veronica’s parents. I left him scrolling frantically through his call history and went to find my boyfriend.
“Let me guess,” Jack said. “We will be foregoing maniacal turkeys for an ER waiting room?”
“I’m sorry, Jack. You can drop me off. I’ll get my mom to come get me. I need to know that Veronica’s going to be all right. I can meet you at Tara’s.”
He put his finger against my lips to shut me up. “That’s not how this works. Let’s go.”
Two hours later, we were still in the waiting room with Veronica’s parents, drinking bad vending machine coffee. I leaned against Jack, trying to keep my eyes open. He took my coffee, which was in danger of spilling out of my tired hands, set it on the table beside him, and pulled me against him. “Go ahead and sleep, Ally. I promise to wake you up when the doctor comes out.”
I was dozing off when the doctor finally came out and asked for Veronica’s parents. They had pumped her stomach and she was going to recover. The doctor then pulled her parents off to the side, talking to them earnestly and quietly. I guessed he was informing them of their daughter’s pregnancy.
“Let’s go home, Jack. She’s going to be okay. That’s all I needed to know,” I said.
We were sitting in his car in front of my house, heater blasting, holding each other, trying to process the events of the evening. “God, Jack. What if we hadn’t been there? What if I hadn’t had that vision?” I shivered, thinking of the consequences.
He held me tighter. “Shh. Don’t think like that. You can’t think like that.”
I sat up and looked into his eyes. “Jack, she said something weird, that I can’t stop thinking about.” I told him what Veronica had said about her stepfather. “She said her mom leaves her to deal with him. She sounded scared, I think. Jack, what if the man in my visions is her stepfather?”
He pulled me back against him. “I don’t know, Ally. What kind of sick bastard would do something like that to his stepdaughter?”
“I have to find out, Jack. I don’t know how, but I have to find out. I have to help her. If this gift is good for anything, I have to figure how to use it to help Veronica. She may be vapid and selfish, but she doesn’t deserve this.”
“Hey.” He held my face. “We will find a way to help her. You don’t have to do this alone.” He kissed me briefly and then changed the subject. “Ally, when you stepped in front of me earlier, you know in the garage with Danny? What in the sweet hell were you thinking, querida?”
I shook my head and looked up into his face. “I have absolutely no idea! I was going on pure instinct. I didn’t want you to get into a fight with that idiot. It was pretty stupid, huh?”
“Beyond stupid.” He softened his harsh words with a soft kiss. “Please don’t ever do anything like that again. You scared the living shit out of me.”
“I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want you hurt, Jack. Thanks for being there for me.”
“That’s my job now.” He kissed me again and then sat back away from me. “I don’t know that guy, Danny, very well, but there was something really off about him tonight, even before he completely lost it. Did you notice?”
“Yeah. I was really shocked by that whole group. They’re so…big,” I ended lamely. “I mean, they never used to be that muscular. It’s really over the top.”
“I agree. You know, I’ve been thinking about a bunch of things that have happened recently, and I think…well, I think those guys might be dosing.” He looked puzzled and concerned.
“Dosing? With what? What does that mean?” I was confused.
“Taking anabolic steroids. It would explain a lot: how big they are, the jokes from the cheerleaders, Danny’s irrational anger.”
“Don’t steroids have, like, massively bad side effects?”
“Yeah, like heart attacks. But I guess athletes will sometimes do stupid things to get an edge.”
I had a hard time getting to sleep that night, worry for Veronica at the top of my list of things going through my mind over and over. I also couldn’t stop thinking about what Jack had said, about the guys using steroids. It made sense and somehow Veronica was involved, but I had no idea how. I was glad that I’d had that vision tonight or it might have been too late for her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“It takes strength and courage to admit the truth.”
–Rick Riordan, The Red Pyramid
Veronica missed the next week of school. I visited her very briefly in the hospital, but barely got a chance to speak to her because her mother was there constantly. I finally got a few minutes alone with her when she sent her mom on an ice cream run to the cafeteria. The second she was out the door, Veronica was out of bed and in my face.
“What is everyone saying? What do they know?” she said frantically.
“I don’t know how he did it, but Danny has managed to spread the rumor around school that you got food poisoning. Apparently you ate bad sushi right before the game and were barfing so much that you got severely dehydrated. Nobody knows about the pills.”
She sank back onto the bed in relief. “Thank God. I could get kicked off the squad if the truth got out.”
“Speaking of truth, Veronica, what about you being pregnant? I mean, are you still? Or did something go wrong? Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s important.”
She drew her knees up and put her head down on them. It reminded me of the night she had tried to kill herself. “Yeah, I’m still pregnant. Nobody knows about that, either. Except my parents. God, they are freaking out. Mom won’t leave me alone for more than a second. Bit late for that,” she said bitterly.