“Stop it, you freaking psycho!” I yelled back. I should have been stronger than her. She had been so sick. I could even smell something rotting on her breath. But she seemed possessed by a demon that fired through her frail frame and pallid skin. “Get the hell off me!” I pushed her, frightened at the wildness in her eyes. I kicked her away with a force that knocked her into the opposite corner of the framed stall. The door swung open again.
“Can I help…” A saleslady’s voice trailed off in midsentence as she moved closer, her eyes darting between us. “There is no fighting in here!” she croaked with one finger in the air. Then she disappeared.
“Hey, wait…help!” I called after her. Christie lunged at me again, but this time I kept her at arm’s length. My fingers squeezed against her wasted muscles, trying to force her hand to open and drop the weapon. My nails, not long but thankfully not recently trimmed, dug into her arm. I could feel her skin start to tear in a couple of places. I squeezed harder. How dare she attack me like this, like some crazy chola. At least the saleslady seemed to jar Christie out of her fury. She started sobbing hysterically, waving the hanger around without aim.
“I am going to cut your face. I want to see you bleed, to see you scream in pain!” She used her free hand to claw at my arms. I twisted away from her, feeling my neck spasm.
The salesperson returned, calling out for us to stop from a distance, and telling us that she had called security. Mascara ran down Christie’s face, and I had bled all over the blue shirt. Pink, blotchy tracks of where my hands and nails had scratched ran down one of Christie’s arms. An officer arrived seconds later to cuff us both and take us to an office in a basement I never realized existed at Marnie’s.
“How did this happen?” A thirtysomething security guard with a Taser holster on his hip sat us across a room from each other after he’d treated us with disinfectant and bandages. Dazed, I realized his shirt was the same French blue as the one I had tried on earlier.
I looked over at Christie and scowled, shaking my head slowly in disgust, incredulous that she had just got us both detained in this place. Her nose wrinkled up at me, and her eyes narrowed, like a feral cat ready to pounce.
“One of you needs to start talking.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said, already picturing how the school would surely expel her now once they knew this story. Dr. Matthews would have to admit she screwed up again by not seeing this coming and allowing her back at Trinity. The girl could have seriously cut me.
“Oh, yes, it was!” Christie shot out of her seat and took a step toward me. The guard stood up, and she backed down.
“Do not move,” he warned, and flipped his attention back at me, silently demanding a response.
Oh, she was so stupid. I could get her in so much trouble. “I’m the one who’s bleeding,” I mumbled, thinking. “She attacked me. She…”
“She stole my boyfriend!” Christie blurted out in a high, desperate pitch.
My head snapped back her way, but I felt sick now to look at her. In just an instant her face had changed from hatred to hellish hurt, and she was a quivering, disheveled mess, her hands still cuffed fifteen feet away from of me.
She was so beaten, but I didn’t see anything I wanted in this. I lowered my eyes. “She attacked me in the dressing room with a broken hanger.” I exhaled, letting some of my anger go. “He was my boyfriend before he was hers, and now he’s mine again.”
I blinked back up at the guard and winced again when I looked at Christie.
“And what do you have to say?” The guard looked at her, but Christie said nothing. Instead, she started rocking a bit back and forth.
“Christie…” I started. “I know you’re hurting. I’m sorry—”
“You don’t know shit! Shut your mouth, you whore!” she snapped. “I wish you were dead.” She convulsed against the chair, almost knocking it down.
I exchanged glances with the guard now, who rolled his eyes at her behavior. I understood why he hadn’t taken her out of restraints, even though mine came off the minute I’d been given first aid in the other room. Sensing he was solidly on my side now didn’t make me feel particularly better, though.
“This is your last chance, young lady!” He stood, his hand reaching for his Taser, where he unbuttoned the safety strap of the holster. “There’ll be no more of that.”
I twitched uncomfortably in my seat. Dead? The word made me shiver and would trigger a whole host of reactions in our school as far as she was concerned. That was it for her, if I told.
Her last chance.
I glanced again over at Christie. She looked like a trapped animal, angry and scared and not thinking straight. I watched the guard’s fingers hover near his Taser, waiting. I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t want to be a part of this. Even if she needed help, I couldn’t be the reason why her life was suspended again. Her words didn’t hurt me. I just wished she’d shut up though, because she was going to hurt herself. She needed to calm down. I could imagine her losing control again, forcing him to arrest her for real. She’d miss her internship, graduation. Her last memory of high school would be this. She wasn’t getting better like us. We’d damaged her. I’d damaged her.
“She doesn’t mean it. She’s just angry. I…made her angry.” My heart beat rapidly in my chest. “I’m really sorry this happened in your store,” I said to the guard. “That it happened at all. If there’s any damage I can pay for it. Just let us go.” I wanted to stop her from making this mistake, to say something on her behalf.
“Oh, sure, Kara Jagger. You just think you can do everything better, make everything right, pretend like this didn’t happen.” Her voice creaked hoarsely, and she started crying. “Make him forget about me,” she sobbed. “But what about me?” The misery in her eyes was scary, but unmistakable. “I don’t forget. I’m living with this every day. You can’t even call it living, really. I don’t even know what I’m doing.” Her voice had descended, and she put her feet up in the chair so she could hide her face and tears behind her bent knees. The desperation reminded me, for some strange reason, of when Ryan told me he was still in love with me.
The security guard frowned at me, but I turned my attention back to Christie. Looking at her crumpled body was like looking back into a dark mirror. I clenched my fists together in my lap. My fingers felt like ice.
“I know about what you’re going through more than you realize,” I started, my heartbeat pulsing through me, nervous about saying what I wanted to say. “I tried what you did before Spring Fling once, too.” I didn’t know if my confession would help, but perhaps it would make her think. She wasn’t as alone as she figured. At one time I had felt nobody was there for me as well.
At first I thought she didn’t hear me and that I would have to repeat myself, but then her swollen, red eyes peeked up at me behind her knees.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever told,” I said.
The room itself seemed to hush at my revelation. Christie stopped crying and I caught the shifting stance of the security guard in my peripheral vision.
“When I was away. I’ve been unhappy, too. Unhappy like you. I had to get help.”
The guard cleared his throat and addressed me. “Did what?”
I continued to watch Christie. She knew exactly what I was talking about. “It’s not anything that happened today,” I said calmly.
She straightened in the chair and stared back at me. A silence fell over the room again until there was a knock on the door. The guard warned Christie not to get up and stepped out for a moment, and then she spoke, her voice stony quiet.
“How do I know you’re not lying?”
“Why would I lie about such a thing? I accidentally overdosed on some Valium that I found in my host family’s medicine cabinet. I didn’t mean to, and I was lucky, because no one caught me.”
“Ha!” The sharp exclamation passed through her lips and kept them open for a few seconds, pausing as she seemed to consider what I said.
Immediately I had second thoughts about telling her my secret. I hoped I hadn’t just handed over another weapon to use against me. I chewed the inside of my lip, watching her carefully, readying myself to move quickly if she tried to attack me again. She didn’t. She rolled her head downwards, letting hair fall across her face.
“I don’t understand how he could tell me he loved me and then just not,” she said after a few seconds. She spoke into space at a memory I couldn’t see.
I took a breath. Her tone had softened, grown more thoughtful and lacked its retributive edge. I picked at my bandage. I was going to have to wear long sleeves for the rest of the school year. What was I going to tell my parents?
“I know he cares for you. He wants you to be well.” I swallowed and looked down from her face to her cuffed hands, which raised in unison to clumsily push some hair away from her eyes. It occurred to me that it was darker now—more caramel colored and natural looking than before. She looked directly at me. “I do, too,” I said, letting more of my own anger ebb away. “But you know, that kind of act is not something Ryan can really help you with. You have to help yourself.”
The guard stepped back into the room and sat a cup of coffee on his desk. “Well, we’ve located your mother,” he said to Christie. “She should be here any minute.”
She didn’t respond. She was staring off into space again, not looking at either one of us.
“I am going to need you to fill out this form if you want to press charges over the attack.” He extended a piece of paper in my direction. “Also, we are going to have to notify both your parents for any damages that may have been incurred in the fitting room and the blouse you two ruined.”
“I’m not going to press charges,” I said. “And I’ll pay for the blouse.”
Christie stared back at me for a minute, and then sighed looking down at her lap, her shoulders relaxing away from her ears. The officer frowned. I felt a crick in my neck release as I stood up to leave. I felt for her. I really did.
***
Kelli was the first person I saw when I returned to the dorm. She had walked in a few minutes before from an afternoon spent with David.
“The funniest thing about the whole incident is I kept seeing something in Christie that would remind me of myself, back when I was so depressed. I mean, I didn’t try to hurt anyone, but I could have hurt myself.” I had finally told Kelli about my secret, and although we’d had a good cry together over the entire memory, she didn’t pass judgment. Now we were doing a second round of analysis about the whole ordeal, including today, having a cup of tea together like old times.
“I know it’s not how she seems now, Kara, but she used to be nice, be funny, someone you could talk to.”
“I know.” I put the fingers of one hand in my front pocket, slightly grazing the platypus that had been with me since I went out this morning. “You and Ryan both thought a lot of her. I should have given her more of a chance.”
“Maybe you would have if she hadn’t been so jealous from the start.”
“I don’t know.” I never liked imagining them together.
“Ryan could have been more honest with her about his feelings, anyway,” she said into the mug as she took a sip.
I shrugged. “He says he needed someone. He wanted to believe in her. It was because I wouldn’t be that person to him. I treated him badly. I left him. I left you and Nic, too.” I took a sip from my own. I felt bad about Christie, shaken as I tried to make sense of things. “I messed things up.”
“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself. You didn’t mess things up. You just wanted a little adventure. That’s the Kara we all know and love. And you came back. We’re all good.”
I wondered if that was the way she truly felt or if Kelli was being selfless again. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, Kelli, through the hardest times. I haven’t known quite how to say it, but I feel like I let you down, not being there to talk through it. I should have kept in touch better.”
“Kara, I was wrapped in my own world. And you had hard times, too. If I had known some of the things you were going through I would have had to sign up to be an exchange student too, to be with you there. Don’t worry about the past. The only difference between me and you, Kara, is sometimes you go looking for challenges. They just seem to find me all by themselves.”
We laughed.
“All by their little old selves,” she said, and we laughed more, letting off a load of built-up tension.
“I’m so glad we’re friends. All these years you’ve made me think about being better…as a person.” I felt tears well in my eyes. I noticed them in Kelli’s, too.
“We’ve always made each other better. That’s what best friends do, okay?” Her arms came around me to give me a hug, and that’s when I noticed.
“Your nails! They look so pretty!” I sniffed. Perfectly manicured, the purple-mauve lacquer was shiny and fresh. There was not a ragged piece of skin in sight.
“It’s been four days.” She smiled proudly.
Chapter 28
Wills
The Friday before graduation my senior class met in chapel for the traditional reading of wills. It was a time that outgoing seniors got to present no more than five special memories of their high school career, including a pledge to leave something behind for a remaining junior who would soon step into their shoes when they returned for their final year. It was a sentimental ceremony, one that the juniors always prefaced by putting on a slide show about members of the departing senior class.
Wills usually fell into four different categories: There were the sweet or funny friendship memorials, the pledge of a heart to a significant other, the sports or activities related anecdotes, and the teacher and academia tributes. But I realized when I prepared my own list that it was difficult to just choose a few of these things.
We still had to sit in alphabetical order, which sucked. It would have been nice to be able to see my friends’ faces as we shared in this event, or seen more than just Ryan’s profile. Still, Christie was in back of me, and I was grateful I didn’t have to look at her. I had only seen her at a distance since our confrontation in Marnie’s. Our internships had taken us to different places, and we’d only come back today for the ceremony and graduation practice, where I sat apart from the main group anyway. I was scheduled to make a speech tomorrow, and Nic would do so as well. They told us it was in honor of our academic standing. I joked with Nic that it just meant that we’d always been good at turning in our homework at Trinity and they figured that at least we would show up prepared.
After a short prayer and introduction, the lights of our chapel dimmed. A slide show started that began with a couple of students when they were only babies. It was amusing to guess who was who. It turned out they were mainly the day students, probably because there was so much other material available for those of us who lived in the dorms. There was Nic, Kelli, and me, along with other boarding students sitting together in Encanto Park under a cold, blue-gray sky. It was taken the first fall we had attended school together, and I remembered that day when everyone seemed to bond like sisters. Another of Kelli brushing her teeth with curlers in her hair our sophomore year came up, and Nic and me in my braces making funny faces in a photo booth at the New Mexico State Fair. “I want that one,” I said aloud when a black-and-white photo of Ryan popped up, writing in chapel in his Mead composition notebook, pursing his lips in concentration.
Sports teams, drill teams, choirs, plays, and debates. They pulled pictures from all kinds of events, and I could hear people in the audience start to sniffle, as well as talk and laugh. Members of the audience called out more comments as the slide show went on. When the last half of our junior y
ear and first part of our senior year came up, my face stopped appearing in the display. This was the time I had been away, and I looked at the set of slides before me with fresh eyes of all those moments I had missed: Kelli and Nic on homecoming court (people whistled), my basketball team winning a trophy at competition (people clapped), and a picture of Ryan and Christie together at a game (murmurs). And then spring came, and there I was again, wearing the short skirt from my school uniform in Sydney. It looked like I was walking through the park. “Nice tan,” a guy’s voice hooted. Lauren let out a small laugh beside me, and I looked sideways at her, noticing Ryan checking out any reaction. I smiled across to them both. At least I didn’t hear any comments from Christie and her friends, I thought gratefully. And soon after we had made it through the slide show. There was applause.
The lights came on, and I turned toward Ryan. He passed me a note. Can’t wait to see you later, it read. Did I tell you today how much I love you?
“Me too,” I mouthed, and put it in my back pocket. We were going out to dinner this evening. Judge Vargas had given us a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant as a thank-you for all the filing and closet cleaning we did for him during our internship, and Ryan’s mom was letting him use her car since he had finally completed driver’s education and gotten his license.
“And now for the reading of the wills,” the junior master of ceremonies announced. “Let’s start with Doug Aragon.”
One minute, seventeen seconds. That was how long it took on average to get through each of the first five wills, with readers taking turns. At this rate it would take about an hour and twenty minutes to get through everyone. I was glad they didn’t let us read our own. People were way too emotional, and although the wills were often funny, overall I was beginning to feel a little down. There naturally was finality to the idea of a will, and I realized the next time I showed up in this chapel, I would be a ghost to my high school past.
Ryan, of course, was called before me. He willed his football jersey number to an up-and-coming sophomore quarterback and a copy of his copious set of notes on all stories by Jack London he had read to the school library. To me, he willed a lifetime pass to the primate section of the ABQ BioPark Zoo. I had to laugh.
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