When

by Victoria Laurie

  I stared hard at the menu.

  “It’s not safe living with her like that,” he continued.

  With a pang of alarm, I knew right then that I could never tell him anything about what had happened the night before with the truck in the park. “She always has a harder time in the fall,” I said defensively.

  He didn’t say anything, so I finally picked my chin up out of the menu. He was looking at me with a mixture of sadness and determination and something else that looked a lot like guilt. “If your dad were alive today, he’d never let you live like this.”

  “If Dad were alive today she wouldn’t be like this.”

  Donny winced, but I wasn’t sorry I’d said it.

  And then he seemed to soften. “Kid,” he said, reaching out to put a hand over mine, “I only mean that I want you to remember that, when you’re ready, my place is your place. Okay?”

  I gave him a crooked smile. “That’s the last thing you need. What’ll all your girlfriends think?”

  Donny grinned. “They’ll think what a good uncle I am to take care of my brother’s kid, and then they’ll want to marry me even more.”

  I rolled my eyes. Donny had a new girlfriend every month, and he was always complaining that they all wanted him to settle down. Donny wasn’t the settling down type—even I knew that, and I was only sixteen.

  After breakfast Donny dropped me off back at home, and I went in to face the music. Ma was up and filling the living room with smoke. “Why does my face hurt?” she asked, rubbing the side of her cheek where it had been resting on the linoleum when I found her.

  “Don’t know. Where’d you go last night?”

  Ma scowled, scratching her matted hair. “Can’t remember. So what’d Donny want to talk to you about?”

  I sat down in Dad’s old leather chair. Ma didn’t like me to sit in it, but I was still pretty mad at her and feeling defiant. She cocked an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. “He just wanted to take me to breakfast.”

  Ma reached out to flick the ashes of her cigarette into the ashtray. “He ask you to move to the city with him?”

  I was surprised by the bluntness of her question and the fact that she knew Donny had asked me that. I decided if Ma wanted to be honest, so could I. “Yeah.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette. “You’d hate the city. It used to give you panic attacks, you know.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s loud and noisy, and you’d have to leave all your friends,” Ma continued, like I had a whole horde of people to hang out with.

  I also noticed she didn’t mention that I’d have to leave her, too.

  “And it’s dangerous,” Ma added, waving her cigarette at me. “We’ve got no crime here, Maddie. You can leave your doors unlocked and nobody bothers you.”

  I folded my arms and looked away. “Unless you’re a kid named Tevon Tibbolt,” I said, thinking again about the truck that had chased me into the park.

  It was Ma’s turn to be silent, and when I finally turned to her again, I was shocked to see her crying. But these weren’t drunk tears. These were real. All of the sudden I felt ashamed. “If you go,” she whispered, “I’ll never get to see you again.”

  I shook my head at her. She was talking crazy.

  “No,” Ma insisted. “It’s true. Donny’s never forgiven me for Scott’s death. He thinks I should’ve told your dad that day to—” Ma seemed to catch herself, and then her tears took over and she covered her face with her hands. I got out of my chair and moved over to the couch to hug her. I felt the guilt coming off her in waves, they crashed into my own and swirled around us in a riptide that tugged and pulled and threatened to tear out my heart.

  Finally, Ma’s tears subsided, and I let go of her to grab a tissue. She mopped at her cheeks and smiled hopefully at me. “I know I need to cut back,” she said. “And I promise, Maddie. I promise I will.” She then reached out and took up my hand. “But I need you here. I can’t make it without you. Promise me you’ll stay?”

  I looked down at our joined hands, and my mind flashed back to a time when I was five and she’d walked me to the bus stop on my first day of school. I’d cried the whole three blocks, and the minute the bus pulled up I’d pressed myself against Ma’s legs and I’d sobbed and sobbed. I hadn’t stopped until she’d bent down to hug me and I realized the bus had pulled away. “It’s okay, baby,” she’d said to me. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  But the next day was the same. I was terrified to leave her side, and my own petrifying shyness left me feeling like I couldn’t possibly board that bus and go off to some faraway place to sit among strangers.

  So we tried again on Wednesday, then on Thursday, and finally on Friday, Ma held my hand just like all the days before, but as the bus rolled to a stop she’d squeezed my hand and looked down at me with a bright, hopeful smile. “There’s the bus to take you to school, Maddie. You’ll have all sorts of adventures, and drink milk and have cookies, and draw pictures, and learn new things. But if you’re not brave enough to get on that bus today, then I’ll understand and we’ll go home and try again next week. But if you can do it today, then I’ll be prouder of you than you could know.” I’d then watched the other kids load onto the bus, and after much hopping from foot to foot, I’d had a moment of rare courage and I’d let go. I remembered so clearly the cold feeling of my palm without Ma’s hand to warm it, and still I’d climbed those big steps onto the bus. Avoiding the driver’s watchful gaze, I’d moved to the first empty seat I could find and shuffled to the window to see Ma standing there with hands clasped over her heart and tears streaming down her face. She was beaming with pride, so happy I could feel it all the way through the walls of the bus, and I knew I was worthy and brave.

  And now Ma was squeezing my hand, asking me to be patient, and I realized that I’d have to hold on until she was brave enough, too.

  True to her word, Ma did make an effort. She got up from the couch, took a shower, dried her hair with the blow dryer, and she even put on makeup. She smiled at me as she came downstairs, and I was struck by how beautiful she still was. The premature lines from years of smoking were still there—and there was a slight puffiness to her face from the drinking—but when Ma made an effort, she was stunning.

  “You look great,” I told her.

  “Yeah?” she said, blushing slightly.

  My smile widened. “Yeah. You really do, Ma.” My gaze drifted to Dad’s picture on the mantel. They had been a beautiful couple.

  Ma sighed and pressed her hands together like she was making a wish. “I’m heading to the Drug Mart on Pavilion. I saw an ad online that they’re looking for part-time help. Wish me luck?”

  I swallowed hard, moved that she was trying. “Good luck, Ma.”

  After she left I called Stubs, but it went right to voice mail. “Hey,” I said in my message. “It’s me. Call me about Payton, okay?”

  I’d been racking my brain trying to come up with a solution that would honor my promise to Donny and still warn Payton in time for her to make another choice. But so far I had no good ideas, and I was also troubled by the possible fact that—no matter what we did—it might not make a difference. I kept returning to the same troubling question: Were the dates fixed? Or could they be changed?

  I finally decided that simply because I didn’t know the answer didn’t mean that Stubs and I still couldn’t try to change destiny. And after what had happened to Tevon, I knew we had to try something that would get Payton’s attention.

  While in my room studying, I was staring up at the bulletin board above my desk—where I’d pinned favorite photos and cards and mementos—and I suddenly had an idea about how to warn Payton. I tried calling Stubs again, but he didn’t pick up, so I texted him.

  With a sigh I got up and went to the window, noticing with a frown that the familiar black sedan was back at the curb.

  Then I saw Ma coming back home, her steps unsteady and clumsy. I knew immediately that she�
��d found someplace to stop for a few drinks. All that hope that’d risen to the surface earlier when she’d come downstairs looking so good had evaporated. My eyes traveled back to the sedan. Those agents must be having a pretty good laugh at seeing my mom stumble home. It filled me with anger, and I clenched my fists, ready to go out there and yell at them, but stopped myself. Yelling at them wouldn’t make things better, and it might actually make things worse.

  A minute or two later Ma came into the house. “I got the job!” she announced.

  But I was mad enough not to care. “You’ve been drinking.”

  Ma shrugged, still happy about her news. “I thought getting a job was worth celebrating,” she sang. Then she moved passed me toward the stairs like coming home stumbling drunk wasn’t a big deal. “I’m going up for a bath. There’s leftover spaghetti in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

  Her words were slurred and slow, and my anger deepened. I was about to say something really mean, when I heard my phone ping. Lifting it out of my pocket I saw that Stubs had sent me a text. Can’t make the diner tonight. TTYL.

  After not hearing from him all weekend, his text felt like a snub. He’d never been ticked off at me this long before. I sat down in Dad’s chair and stared at my phone, trying to think of the words that would make it better between us, but nothing came to me, so I left it alone and hoped I’d find the right words in the morning.

  I FOUND STUBBY AT HIS locker on monday morning with a fresh set of bruises to his right cheek and his hand in a cast. “Dude!” I said when I saw him. “What happened?”

  “It looks worse than it is,” he told me.

  I took hold of his casted hand. “Yeah, this doesn’t look bad at all. It’s only a flesh wound, right?”

  Stubby humored me with a grin. “It’s a hairline fracture. I only have to wear the cast for a couple of weeks.”

  “The half-pipe?” I asked.

  Stubby shuffled his books into the crook of his arm and used his elbow to shut his locker. “I was trying a new trick.”

  I took his books and helped load them into his backpack. “Yeah? Well, try harder next time.”

  He shrugged. “It was worth it. Sorry I didn’t make it to the diner, but I was at the ER until late.”

  I immediately felt guilty about thinking he’d snubbed me the night before. We started down the hall together. “I wish I’d known. I would’ve picked up a slice of pie and brought it to you.”

  Stubs grinned, and I knew we were okay again. “Next time I’ll send you the deets.” And then he changed the subject. “Did you come up with a way to warn Payton?”

  I sighed. My idea wasn’t great, but it was all I could think of given Donny’s warning and how Faraday and Wallace were watching nearly my every move. “It’s super tricky. The feds have pretty much camped out in front of my house, and they’re watching me like a hawk.”

  “Do you think they’re tapping your phones?” Stubs asked.

  My eyes widened. I hadn’t thought of that. “Don’t know. But if they are, they might also try and tap into my e-mail and texts. We can’t talk about any of this on the phone.” I was suddenly very grateful that Stubs hadn’t tried to call or text me about it over the weekend.

  “What if I sent her an e-mail or an anonymous text?” Stubby asked. I started to shake my head, but he held up his hand and said, “Wait, before you say no, there’re a ton of apps that let you send someone an anonymous email or text, and the sender’s info disappears in, like, a minute. They’re untraceable.”

  I sighed. “That could work, but how do we get Payton’s e-mail address or her cell number?”

  Stubby’s face fell. “That, I haven’t figured out yet.”

  And then I offered up my idea—the one that’d formed after looking at the last birthday card I’d received from my Dad, which I had tacked to my bulletin board at home. “I think we should send her a card for her birthday.”

  “A birthday card?”

  I nodded vigorously. “Yeah, Stubs, she’d totally open a birthday card, even if it didn’t have a return address, just to see if there was a check inside or to find out who it was from. I’ll bet if you dig around on the Web, you could come up with her parents’ home address, right?”

  “Her last name is Wyly, and she lives in Jupiter. Yeah, I could find it. What would we say in the card?” Looking at him I knew he was intrigued by the idea.

  “I don’t know, but we’d have to be careful about it. We’d have to say something like, ‘We heard you’re getting a new car for your birthday, and you need to be really careful driving it.’ Maybe we could throw in something like, ‘Don’t text and drive!’ and back it up with a statistic or something.”

  Stubby eyed me like I was nuts. “She’s not going to believe something like that, Mads. Plus, we don’t know for sure if that’s the way she’s going to die.”

  “Well, then, what would you suggest?” I was a little exasperated. I had no idea how to warn Payton, because, like Stubby pointed out, I had no idea how she was going to die. If I knew that, then I could set something in motion to prevent it, but all I had was the date. That’s it. Only a date to indicate that she was a dead girl walking.

  “Maybe we could call her parents’ house like we called Mrs. Tibbolt?”

  I shook my head. “If the feds are tapping my phone, they might also be tapping yours, Stubs. We called her from your phone, remember?”

  Stubby frowned, but then he brightened. “Okay, then we’ll make the call from a public phone, ask for Payton, and disguise our voices. We could say we know something she doesn’t. We know she’s in danger, and we’re worried that she might die on her birthday.”

  It was my turn to look at Stubs like he had to be kidding. “If you got a phone call from a total stranger telling you that you were about to die, wouldn’t your next call be to the police to report a death threat from a lunatic? She’d dismiss the warning, which wouldn’t help her, and report the call, which wouldn’t help us. What if a surveillance camera catches us using the phone? Those cameras are everywhere. We can’t risk it.”

  Stubby’s gaze dropped. “Well, we have to try something that she’ll believe, Mads.”

  “I agree,” I told him, and I meant it. “But you also need to accept that even if we get her attention and she believes us, it might not prevent her death. It could still happen.”

  Stubby frowned. “But even if there’s a chance we can save her, we have to try,” he said. I could tell that he was still feeling guilty over not trying harder to save Tevon.

  I put a hand on his good arm. “You’re right, and we’ll warn her with the card. We’ll be really careful not to leave our fingerprints on it, and we’ll choose the wording so that we don’t come off sounding crazy. Hopefully she’ll listen and be careful next Wednesday, but that’s the most we can do. Anything else is too dangerous for us and could even push her to do something risky simply to prove us wrong.”

  Stubs sighed and nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “We’ll go with the card.”

  After school we headed for the Drug Mart, and I almost came up short when I saw Ma in a blue smock standing next to another employee who was showing her how to organize the developed-photos envelopes. “Hi, you two!” She waved when she spotted us.

  “Whoa, Mrs. Fynn!” Stubs said, almost as shocked as I was to see her behind the counter. “When did you start working here?”

  “Today is my first day,” Ma said proudly.

  I smiled encouragingly at her but couldn’t help drop my gaze to her hands. If there were tremors, I knew she’d be totally sober. If they were calm, I knew she’d be sneaking sips in the back.

  I bit my lip when I saw that there wasn’t a hint of a tremor. I could only hope that nobody at the store caught on.

  Ma waved us away, saying that she had to focus on her training. We headed to the card rack and picked out one together. Making sure not to handle it with our bare hands, we paid for it and headed across town to the Starbucks next
to the Jupiter post office to carefully craft a message.

  Stubby wrote the message out using his casted hand, which was a good thing because it altered his handwriting enough to make it nearly illegible. We decided to send Payton a message from a secret admirer (that part was true at least), and told her that we were someone who sometimes had strange visions that came true. We wrote that she needed to be very careful when she drove, especially on her birthday. And in general we told her to be careful on her birthday because the alignment of the stars suggested that it was an unlucky day for her.

  As Stubby read it back to me I had to admit that it did sound a little crazy, but it was the best plan we had. “If you got this card, what would you think?” Stubs asked me.

  I frowned. “I’d probably think that some wacko had sent it, but I’d probably also listen to the message—just in case.”

  Stubby then shoved the card into the envelope using his sleeve to cover his hands. Then he used his phone to look up her address. It took a few clicks to get the Wylys’ new address in Jupiter, but we were confident our card would find its way to her. Stubs then stood to head next door to mail it and said, “You coming?”

  But I was only halfway through my caramel latte, and it was so nice and warm in the Starbucks. “I think I’ll stay here and study for a while.”

  Stubs nodded, looking troubled. I knew he was wishing we had a better plan. With a wave he said, “I’ll text ya later,” and then he was gone.

  I sighed, fighting the feeling that I’d let him down, and poked at my drink with the plastic stirrer, when all of a sudden I heard a voice I’d recognize anywhere, and I felt a jolt of adrenaline stiffen my spine. Slouching down in my seat, I leaned out slightly and saw Aiden standing at the counter joking with two buddies while they waited for the barista to take their orders.