Damage Done Page 3

  “I don’t even know Michael Silverman,” I said. “I’ve spoken to him, like, once.” I’d actually spoken to him four and a half times including today, if you counted our teacher-mandated interactions. “And it was in mangled Spanish, because that’s the only class we have together. And it was about tacos. And today he thinks I’m sick. So I just want to go home.”

  “You might not know him, but you loooove him,” Alane said, her voice a singsong.

  I was glad I’d dropped my books. It left both my hands free to smack her.

  “Okay, I deserved that,” Alane said, wincing and rubbing her shoulder. “But seriously, we’re going and I’m not going to take no for an answer.”

  “Would you take me hitting you again as an answer?” I asked. “Because I’m serious. I can’t do the whole social-with-other-people thing right now.”

  “You’re being social with me.”

  “You don’t count as a person,” I said. “I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.”

  “How do you expect to fall deeply in love and have his babies if you won’t even talk to him?” she said, pouting.

  “I have talked to him.” Four and a half times. “We’ve had some great conversations.” He’d seemed especially excited and cheerful at the idea of eating tacos with dog meat, perro being the only animal word I could think of at the time. “And who said anything about having his babies? I don’t want to have anyone’s babies right now.”

  “God, Lucy, it was just an expression.”

  I took a step forward, and she followed. Good. We were on our way to the parking lot. Each step was a step closer to being home, where I would have a chance to obsess about Spence and my brother, and whether I had, in fact, cracked right down the middle and spewed a giant fountain of crazy all over the school day.

  “The only babies I’d want to have right now are yours, baby,” I said, waggling my eyebrows.

  She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “God, Lucy, you’re such a loser.”

  We crossed over the doorway and outside, and I instinctively breathed in the sun. SoCal sunshine had a different smell than NorCal sunshine; the former was bright and clean, almost tangy, while the latter had been stuffier, mustier. Foggier.

  “I really want to go home. I can probably find another ride if you really want to go to Crazy Elliot’s,” I said.

  She gave me a mock slap on the shoulder. “I’m proud to be your Jeeves,” she said. “And your future baby-daddy. Let’s get you home.”

  We were five minutes into the ride when the smell drifted in through the open window, and I froze. “Do you smell that?” I said, hardly breathing.

  She took a sniff. “Yeah. Smoky. Someone’s probably burning leaves. Or having a barbecue.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “What’s up with you today? First you had that panic attack this morning, and you look like you’re going to have one now. Should I pull over?”

  My chest was tight, as if someone had wrapped me in rubber bands. “No,” I managed to say. I took quick, shallow breaths through my mouth. Not through my nose. Not with the smoke in the air.

  I could feel her concern burning my left cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I won’t puke on your upholstery. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” she said. “My upholstery’s had plenty of puke on it already.” Gross. Suddenly my butt, my legs, everything touching the seat felt itchy. “But are you okay? You can tell me. If you don’t, what sort of example are you setting for our future children?”

  I barked something I hoped sounded like a laugh. “It’s just the smell of smoke,” I said. “And fire. It brings back bad memories. From before I moved.” That was vague enough, I thought.

  The truth was anything but vague. After poor Fluffy, there had been squirrels and mice and a few cats. The cats’ MISSING posters still haunted me with their desperate appeals and flashy rewards.

  And then there had been a fire.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” I said flatly. Her face fell, and I realized my answer had come out more harshly than I’d intended. “I mean, sorry. I just…don’t want to. It doesn’t matter anyway. The person who set the fire is dead.”

  “Oh,” she said, her tone abnormally subdued. “I’m sorry. If you ever want to talk about it, you know I’m always here.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and meant it. We drove in silence for the rest of the ride, with Alane occasionally sneaking a glance at me when she thought I wasn’t looking, and she bid me goodbye with a hug tighter than the rubber bands around my chest. I waved as she pulled away.

  I had lied to her. I had lied to myself.

  My brother wasn’t dead.

  If the public had their way—and if my old classmates had their way—my brother would be rotting in his grave, or, alternatively, rotting in a jail cell before getting a needle stuck into his arm that would stop his heart and send him to that grave just a little bit later. Even if my brother had had his way, he would be dead. He’d turned the gun on himself after he shot all those other people, but it hadn’t killed him.

  He might as well have been dead. The doctors had had to put him into a medically induced coma, drilling into his skull to relieve the pressure and keep his swelling brain from becoming irreversibly damaged. As if his brain wasn’t already irreversibly damaged. I still remember my parents sitting me down in our old living room and telling me he’d never wake up and the howl that had escaped my throat when I realized I’d never talk to him again. Sometimes I wondered if it might have been a kindness on the doctors’ part rather than a medical decision.

  I think that might have been why the world was so angry. Because he wasn’t really dead and he wasn’t really alive. He’d taken the coward’s way out in attempting suicide, and he hadn’t even succeeded. He couldn’t face justice, and he wasn’t sharing the oblivion of his victims—or burning in hell, depending on your religion. There was no other outlet for the public’s fury, and so the outlet became me—his twin.

  I had been to visit him exactly twice, both in the week after the shooting. He’d become progressively gray-faced and hollow-cheeked. The only sound in the room was the beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor. There were always a couple of cops, their sides bulging with guns, hovering around his bed or the doorway. I’d tried just about everything I could think of to be alone with him, to lean over and whisper into his ear and wait for his eyes to pop open for me, because I was his twin, his other half, and I was the only one who might possibly understand, just a little, but they never left, not even when I set off the fire alarm to try to get the ward evacuated.

  I wasn’t allowed to visit after that.

  A week after the shooting, the state police transported him to a more secure ICU. They talked to my parents, and my parents talked to me: Ryan would never wake up. Every month or so, my father would disappear for a few days. My mother would say he was on a business trip, but once I’d found his flight itinerary. I knew business wasn’t why he was in NorCal. I knew love had nothing to do with it, either: he never spent this much time with Ryan when he was awake. My father was a lawyer; he’d probably been in the hospital examining every drip of medication going into his son’s veins, sniffing as hard as he could for a lawsuit.

  Back in the safety of my Sunny Vale living room, I tried calling Spence’s office again; I got the same patient receptionist telling me he was out of the office for the next few weeks. I hung up on her midsentence and paced around the room for a good ten minutes, wiping my sweaty palms on my shirt so many times it clung to my skin with wetness. I needed to calm down.

  “What would Lucy do?” I asked myself. I should really have that printed on a bracelet, like the rubber WWJD bands the kids in the Purity Club wore to school. What would Lucy Black do—WWLBD? What would a normal person do? “Normal girls eat chocolate and ice cream when they’re upset. So Lucy should eat some chocolate or ice crea
m. Or chocolate ice cream. That’s even better. Now stop talking, because normal people don’t talk to themselves.”

  We didn’t have any chocolate or ice cream in the house, only green things like kale and broccoli. Those wouldn’t do. Luckily there was a convenience store within walking distance. Walking was good. Walking would give Lucy a chance to burn off some of her excess energy.

  I set off down the road, my heart still leaping and flailing in my chest like a frog in boiling water. Cars whooshed by me as I plodded along through the scrappy grass on the roadside, kicking the occasional flattened can glittering under the dying sunlight. I found a sort of calm in the walk, in putting one foot in front of the other, in knowing I wasn’t actually a crazy person, because a crazy person would do something crazy, like throw herself in front of a car or dance in the middle of the road, not plod, plod, plod like Lucy Black.

  I don’t know what made me turn and squint into the sunset behind me. Maybe I heard, faintly, the faraway crunch of shoes over the dying grass, or maybe I was seized by the urge to admire the melting colors of the California sky. Whatever it was, it made me turn and see the man strolling behind me. Not behind me in an about-to-reach-out-and-strangle-me kind of way, but behind me in a half-the-length-of-a-football-field kind of way. On the other side of the road, too, so my view kept breaking up thanks to the cars whizzing past. I stopped short, squinting harder, trying to make out anything besides the suit he was wearing, and he paused. And waved.

  The lump rose from my stomach back into my throat. “Hey,” I called weakly. “Hey!”

  What, had he been waiting to get me alone? Well, I was alone. And I was ready to duke it out. I wasn’t going to let him pop up and ruin my life again. No, not my life. Lucy’s life. Lucy’s life was a precious thing.

  “Hey!” I shouted, and launched myself after him. Into the middle of the road. Where there was a car bearing down on me.

  Panic wrapped itself around my head like a scarf, blinding me. I threw myself backward and felt the car whoosh past, so close I could feel its heat.

  When I blinked, I found myself on the ground at the side of the road, my heart beating so hard against the dirt it felt as if there were a herd of horses galloping over me. At some point, I became aware that some of the hoof beats weren’t just my heart—they were another person’s footsteps running toward me.

  “Lucy?” someone was saying. “Lucy Black, are you okay?”

  I looked up. It was Michael Silverman.

  Naturally.

  At least it wasn’t Spence. I licked my lips and propped myself up on an elbow, then immediately gave up on trying to look even remotely attractive. I was soaked in sweat and caked with dirt, and there was something wet that I hoped was water dripping down my leg. I took a big sniff under pretense of taking a deep breath. I’d just landed in a puddle. Thank God. “Michael,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  He crouched down beside me. “Are you okay? God, I’m so sorry. I take my eyes off the road for a second and…”

  So he hadn’t seen me wander into the road. He thought he was the one who’d messed up. “I’ll live,” I said, rotating my joints just to make sure. My right ankle creaked a little bit in protest, but thanks to an old sprain, that one had always been a temperamental little bastard anyway. “Did you see that man? Across the street? By the side of the road?”

  Michael shaded his eyes and peered around. “I don’t see anyone. Don’t tell me I hit someone else.”

  I pushed myself to my knees, then stood, tottering just a little bit. “You didn’t hit me. I got out of the way just in time.”

  “You have good reflexes,” he said. He stuck his hands in his pockets and squinted into the setting sun. Its last rays poured over him, turning flyaway hairs to gold. “What were you doing out here? It’s dangerous, without any sidewalks.”

  “It was an ice cream emergency,” I said. “As in, I didn’t have any in the freezer. The store’s right down the road.” Someone like Lucy would need ice cream even more after this whole mishap. She would probably eat a whole pint on the couch, in sweatpants, watching a Nicholas Sparks movie.

  “Let me drive you,” he said. “It’s the least I can do after running you down.”

  “The least you could’ve done is leave me lying there. At least you stopped.” I turned again and craned my neck. Spence had vanished, almost like he’d never been there at all. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe this was it: I was officially seeing people who weren’t there. Maybe my brother had been seeing people who weren’t there that day, too.

  Then again, maybe Spence was real, and he was out to get me, and if I turned around and went home, he’d follow me there. I certainly did not want him coming across my parents. It would be best for everyone, I decided, if I got into Michael’s car.

  “Thanks,” I said, and climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s been one of those days.”

  “I can tell,” he said, climbing in himself. “First you were dying of a cold in Spanish, and then you were almost run over by some maniac driver.”

  I laughed as he pulled away. It tasted unexpected and sweet. “Thank goodness you were there to rescue me from that maniac,” I said. “Were you coming from Crazy Elliot’s?” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. Only a creepy stalker would know he went to Crazy Elliot’s after school with the swim team. “I mean, or swim practice, or school, or home, or wherever you went.” Nice save, Lucy.

  “Nah, I usually go to Crazy’s after swim, but I didn’t feel like going today.” I couldn’t help but notice he was driving ten miles under the speed limit, like being hit at forty miles per hour instead of fifty would make somebody any less dead. “I can only take so much of the guys. You still don’t look great, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” I said drily. “Way to win a girl’s heart.”

  He rolled his eyes. He smelled so strongly of chlorine he was practically giving off waves. Wasn’t he supposed to shower after practice? My brother always did, though the smell of chlorine was never quite scrubbed from his skin.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Michael said. “You just look like you’ve seen a ghost. I think you’re wrong and that you do get sick and that you’re breathing germs all over my dashboard and I’m going to get sick, too, and miss Friday’s meet.”

  “I’m not sick. I promise.” I squinted out the front window, watching the yards and yards of asphalt disappear beneath our tires. I was anonymous, blank as that road. No matter how much I wanted to talk about Spence, about the idea that I was being followed, about the frightening and all-too-possible idea that I was seeing things that weren’t there, I couldn’t. Because all that belonged to Julia, and I was Lucy, and our two minds couldn’t meet or the world would probably explode on a quantum level.

  But maybe I could say something. “I’m worried I’m being followed,” I said. “I saw him this morning in the school parking lot, and then just now on the side of the road. But I might just be seeing things.”

  Michael risked a look away from the road. “Followed by who?”

  I sighed. “I don’t even know why I feel like I can tell you this. I barely know you.”

  He leaned toward me, almost imperceptibly. “I’m a good listener.”

  I sighed again, stalling. I had to come up with something quickly. Obviously I couldn’t tell him the truth. “For some reason I feel like I can trust you,” I said. “I can trust you, right? Not to tell anyone? I don’t want it to get around.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I swear. You can trust me.”

  Voilà. The perfect lie popped into my head. “My ex,” I said. I could lie with the best of them—it had always been one of my talents. My clincher was the strategic hesitation. It wasn’t a skill I’d enjoyed honing, understand, but over the past year, lying had become a necessity. “From where I used to live. He was…not a nice person. It was…one of the reasons we moved.”

  His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “My dad’s a cop,” he said. “
Should I talk to him?”

  “No, no.” I waved at the window as if the idea were preposterous. It just made his knuckles whiter. I had him, I thought. I knew his type: the white knight. He wanted to save the princess, to kiss her awake after her bite of poisoned apple.

  Well, I couldn’t be saved. I was beyond saving. “I don’t think it was him,” I said. “He doesn’t even know I moved down here. I think I was just seeing things. It just freaked me out. You know, all the memories.” I put a hand to my upper arm as if I were unconsciously tracing a bruise. Strategic hesitation and body language. “But thank you.”

  “Of course, Lucy. Just let me know.” The lights of the convenience store glowed ahead; Michael pulled into the parking lot and turned off his ignition. The ting, ting, ting of the engine winding down reverberated through the car. “I’ll come in with you,” he said. “I have to pick up some stuff, and then I’ll take you home.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said as I climbed out.

  “It’s almost dark,” he said. “And you were already almost killed by a crazy driver today.”

  I snorted as we entered the store. “And you had nothing to do with that.”

  He paused in the doorway. “As if,” he said, sounding greatly affronted. “I’m a great driver.”

  “Either come in or stay out!” someone called from inside the store. “You’re letting out all the cold air!”

  I shot a nasty look at the clerk, who shot one right back, and rolled my eyes at Michael. “Of course you are,” I said, and stepped into the store. Michael followed me in, and the door eased closed behind him.

  He had said he needed to pick some stuff up, but he trailed me to the freezer. “Don’t you have to go get stuff?”

  “No,” he said. “I just wanted to come in with you.”

  “Oh,” I said. Tenderness swept over me, as soft and warm as the Southern California sun. “What’s your favorite flavor?”

  “What?”

  I gestured to the shelves and shelves of ice cream. “Your favorite flavor,” I said. “What is it?”