Premeditated (11 page)

The Claire I knew wouldn’t have even considered the second option.

She sounded so happy. It was worse that I could hear her voice chirping away in my head giving excuses as to why she couldn’t send me pictures: Brooks was “Internet safe” and only posted drawings to his public profile; Brooks was camera shy. She thought I’d really like him.…

I looked everywhere I could think of for her phone—including unscrewing the air vents—just in case she’d managed to catch me some proof, but I never found any.

That made two of us.

Every file on that card was a letter to me. They progressed from her giggly nerves over an older guy she thought was out of her league to moon-eyed infatuation with Brooks that was little more than a free-form ramble dedicated to his eyes, and hair, and too-white teeth, followed by anticipation of dates and days at Freeman’s Point.

Afraid of acting her age and having Brooks shun her for it, Little Miss Can’t-Do-Her-Health-Homework-Without-Blushing
suddenly decided that under the pier and out of her shirt was the best way to watch
The Princess Bride
. If I hadn’t known where she was going to end up a few weeks after she wrote that entry, I probably would have cheered for her loosening up. But Claire was already in over her head.

Her spontaneous strip-down was the last, steep step before topless under the pier became naked under the pier. And I bet that stupid, innocent, too-trusting kid believed Brooks when he said it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help himself—she was too pretty, and the movie was too romantic. She told me so in the letter she never sent.

It started:
I’m not a virgin anymore.… Please don’t hate me
.

Everything that came after was a system purge of confusion, embarrassment, and betrayal. She probably didn’t even notice when she wrote it out, but she kept repeating things like “I told him to stop” and “I asked him to slow down” and “I said no, but I guess he didn’t hear me.” She hadn’t wanted to raise her voice because she was afraid someone else at the Point might hear, and in her mind things would get worse if someone caught them.

Tabs had heard about the “the new guy” in glorious crush-worthy detail, but not about this. I’d spoken to Claire a dozen times and had never heard anything in her voice to hint at how far she’d withdrawn into herself. Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul shared a house with her, knew every facial tic and nervous habit, and they didn’t have a clue.

Abigail-not-Abby didn’t know what she was asking for when she wished for a body that looked older than fifteen. She was so much like my cousin in every way but the physical. When everything was over, I wanted to make her read Claire’s words
until they sank in and she realized how lucky she was that no one hassled her.

By the next letter, Claire was doing what she always did: she brushed over anything unpleasant with a fresh coat of sunny yellow paint and pretended she’d overreacted. She actually thought the fact that Brooks hadn’t called her and didn’t come to her birthday party meant he was embarrassed, too. She would have called him and told him not to worry, but he claimed he’d dropped his phone in the lake.

And she believed him. The boy drove a Beemer, and she believed he didn’t have access to a cell phone.

Claire acted like the real world worked the same way as a musical, where even the bad stuff wasn’t so terrible. She restructured things in her head so that what happened at Freeman’s Point worked into her big-picture plan. She was going to surprise Brooks, likely the first day of school, when she started Lowry, like the first scenes in
Grease
, and she expected just as happy an ending, spontaneous choreographed dance numbers and flying cars included.

But reality didn’t play along with her fantasy. Brooks kept not showing up and not calling. Her vision for how they’d spend the last few weeks of the summer never came true. It took a while, but she finally got the message that her beginning had been his ending—he was through with her.

Claire didn’t get angry like a normal girl who’d been dumped; she got scared.

Poor little rich girl, good enough for a roll under the pier if you don’t mind used goods
.

In Claire’s overactive imagination it had already happened. Everyone at Lowry was waiting with a hot branding iron to
burn a red “A” into her chest the first day of school. No, a red “F,” she said, because “A” was only for “adulterer,” and she, at least, hadn’t cheated on anyone. It never occurred to her that “rich girl” was the default setting for people who went to Lowry, or that maybe she wasn’t alone in the Brooks Walden Disposable Girlfriend Club.

The last entries before her not-suicide were dedicated to talking herself out of and then back into cutting herself. She’d gotten frustrated enough to break a mirror with her fist, and letting the pain out had made her feel better.

She fell apart and I wasn’t there to help her hold it together (or tell her just to find him at the mall again, dump his Jilly Juice on his head, and give him a swift kick to the crotch).

There was so much in those letters it took me days to get through them, and I’d been coasting on adrenaline and raw fury since that first night I’d found out who had made the most perfect person I’d ever known see herself as so worthless she wanted to disappear. Meeting Brooks in the flesh and making the monster real finally put me over the edge. I was wiped out.

I lay in Claire’s bed, hugging that hideous snow leopard while its voice box purred. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was the macabre light show of LCD displays from the hospital. The beeps and pings echoed in my head, refusing to stop. They morphed into the ringtone I had set to warn me when my mother was calling and I fell asleep, dreaming that the cold water at Freedman’s Point was closing over my head, drowning everything out and pulling me down into sweet oblivion.

You know the cartoon version of a teenager clinging to the bed at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, pillow over their head and scooting farther away from the window as the sun moves, until they finally fall off the edge in a tangle of sheets? That’s me. Seriously. I’ve got the scar on my chin to prove it.

I hate alarms. At eight o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, I hate clocks period, but the morning after my recon trip into killer-infested waters, I didn’t even need the alarm. I was up and waiting for Tabs with time to spare before she rang the bell.

“This wasn’t my fault,” she blurted as soon as I pulled the front door open.

I knew that look.

“Who did you tell?”

“No one. At least, not intentionally …”

Grimace sat parked at the base of the stairs in front of the house, and a very familiar, very tall, very thin, and very pale person climbed out of the passenger seat.

Everything about Brucey requires a “very” in front of it; he doesn’t have a lower setting.

“She doesn’t write; she doesn’t call. I was beginning to think our dodo bird had really gone extinct.”

“Tabs!” I’ll admit it, I shrieked. There may have even been slapping involved. “You told Brucey!”

“No?” Whenever Tabs lies, her statements become questions.

“How much does he know?”

“You know, a fella could get the impression that perhaps no one wants him to help destroy the life of the next generation’s social elite. Even though I’ve more than proven myself as an evil genius in training through our countless joint endeavors—”

I stuck my hand over his motor mouth.

“Why is he talking like this?” I asked Tabs. “He sounds like someone rebooted his brain with an upgrade.”

“Technology puns!” Brucey beamed. He lifted me off the ground so we were at eye level and twirled me into the house. “She still loves me! When do I get to see you in your disguise? Is it plaid? Are there knee socks? Barrettes?”

“He’s in one of his weird moods.”

Yes, he was. Very weird. He’d pulled his hair back into a (brushed!) ponytail, and the only piercings I could see were the black spacers in his ears; all the polish was off his nails. The way he was dressed, he could have passed for the film student he liked to pretend he was.

“Don’t blame dear Tabitha, my lovely vigilante. ’Tis not her fault.”

“Are you on something?” I pulled his eyelids down at the bottom for a better look. “You tested the orange powder on him, didn’t you?”

“I am in character, and high on the prospect of mayhem for a good cause,” he said as he set me down. “When do we get to synchronize our watches? How about reconnoitering? Do we get to reconnoiter?”

Ah. There was my Brucey. He slouched, knocking three
inches off his height, and jammed his hands in his pockets. His eyebrows waggled up and down in what he called his “sneaky look.”

“How do people stand up straight all day?” he asked. “It’s painful.”

“Only for you,” Tabs groused. “Normal people can’t have an eye-to-eye conversation with a giraffe.”

“It’s only easy for you because you’ve got a counterbalance.” He smirked. “Two of them.”

“Pervert.” Tabs scowled, crossing her arms over her chest.

“At your service.”

Brucey gave her a dramatic bow.

“Guys, please … 
focus!
” They snapped to attention. “If Tabs didn’t tell you about me and Brooks, then how’d you know?”

“Remember how I said we were going to get caught?” Tabs asked.

“Yeah? So?”

“We got caught.”

“What happens in Vegas stays in your call log, doll.” Brucey vaulted himself over the back of the sofa, landing with his long legs out in front of him across the cushions.

“He synched my phone,” Tabs said apologetically.

“Tabs!”

“It’s not my fault. I had to pee and I left it on my desk.”

“You know you can’t leave Brucey alone with any kind of tech. He can’t control himself.”

“There’s a fine line between insult and playful banter, dear harridans. I’m tempted to take your snarking as character assassination, and then I’d have to do something unpleasant with your photographic evidence.”

Brucey waved something in the air over his head.

“My phone!”

I launched myself over the sofa to take it back, but Orangutan Arms held it out of range.

“This the guy?” he asked, calling up my lunchroom snapshots of Brooks Walden’s smug, smiling face.

“Yes! Now give it back, you friggin’ klepto.”

Yes, I said “friggin’.” You’d have to actually enter my aunt and uncle’s house to understand what happens there, but it’s impossible to use real curse words in that environment without being slammed by the feeling that you’ve just kicked a puppy in front of a five-year-old. Eventually, you start to censor yourself. (I suspect that one of Uncle Paul’s many secret projects includes a box like the kind people use to recut R-rated movies, only it works on real people and makes them all nice against their will.)

“Kleptomania is a medical condition beyond the afflicted’s control. Picking pockets is a legitimate trade, thank you very much. I only pinch what I intend to take and nothing more.”

“Fine, fork over the phone, you friggin’ legitimate thief.”

“Smoochies?”

I glanced at Tabs, who’d positioned herself on the other side of the couch.

“Get him!”

We grabbed the couch pillows and pounced—just like Kyle Smith in kindergarten, only with less intent to maim.

“Dinah? What’s going on in—” Uncle Paul came into the living room from his morning coffee run in the kitchen. He was still wearing the clothes he’d had on the night before, so
he must not have slept at the house. “Oh, you’re smothering Brucey. There’s superglue under the sink if you break something.”

“Morning, Mr. Reed.” Tabs put her weight on her elbow so she could hold Brucey down with one arm.

“Hello, Tabitha. Okay there, Brucey?”

Brucey waved with his free hand and gave Uncle Paul a thumbs-up. He shoved Tabs’ pillow off his mouth and said, “Death by pillow fight is every guy’s fantasy.” Which only made her press down harder with her elbow.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Paul, we’ll dispose of the body when we’re done. Then we’re going to the mall.”

“We’ll find an extralong bedsheet to bury him in and everything,” Tabs promised.

“Wipe the place down for prints before you go,” Uncle Paul said. “I think your prisoner’s escaping.”

Brucey had stopped fighting back and was inching his way to the far end of the sofa, caterpillar-style, to try and make a break for it.

“Stay out of my office, Brucey,” Uncle Paul warned as he left.

“Scout’s honor. You know me, Mr. Reed.”

Uncle Paul froze midstep and turned back toward the hallway that led to his office.