Premeditated (17 page)

Once we noticed the rain was no longer pinging off the roof, I told him I needed to get home. We checked on the BMW and found that the port cochere had covered the interior, so it was dry enough for Brooks to drive me home. Tabs and Brucey (freshly rescued from the mall cops by Dr. Useless)
were waiting for me, and the sum total of their input since we’d started combing through the afternoon’s events was “Kill the car.” It was most likely my fault, as I may have—momentarily—let my focus slip off our brainstorming and back to the Veyron. Once or twice. (Twelve times, tops.)

I’m a car guy’s kid, what can I say?

“I’d kill
you
before I put a dent in that car,” I said.

Brucey popped his eyes up over his open laptop.

“This is becoming a nasty habit—threatening violence and planning demises. Once is temporary insanity; twice is a career path. Not saying you shouldn’t go with your strengths, but think how it’s going look on a job application under ‘experience.’ ”

We were back in Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen’s kitchen with Brucey once again trenched in behind his computer (and supposedly data-mining the haul from Brooks’ phone). Tabs was pure
Twilight Zone
material, standing beside the oven wearing Aunt Helen’s duck apron while she stirred what she had started calling “the secret recipe” (basically, Betty Crocker mixed with a bottle and a half of her mom’s capsule stash). I was in charge of dying icing with food coloring, which would have been easier if Brucey hadn’t poked his fingers in the bowl every twenty seconds.

“Kill the car,” Tabs said again. “It’s a big-ticket item; seeing it destroyed will draw a lot of attention. Remember that wreck two years ago? It made the news just because there was a pair of Porsches in it. That thing he’s got would make waves if he chipped the paint. If it looks like our social deviant is to blame, then all the better.”

“You’re not touching the car. End of discussion.”

“We don’t have to destroy it,” Tabs said. “We could use it as a set piece. A pair of underwear, a bottle of booze, maybe some pills under the backseat … then we get him pulled over.”

“No! What is it with you and my panties today?”

“I never said they had to be yours.” Tabs wiggled her butt and reached for a set of hideous oven mitts shaped like trout.

“Can I please put a fish in the wheel well?” Brucey asked. “I’ve always wanted to see if that would work. Pleeeeease?”

“How much of this have you eaten?” I slid the bowl of frosting out of his reach.

“Four fingers’ worth.” Brucey held up his hand, which was stained with splotches of the blue and purple coloring I’d been using to make black, then hooked a finger in the frosting bowl to scoot it back to his side of the table.

“Did you spike the frosting, too?”

“Fine.” He pouted. “Then what about the Ping-Pong ball thing like with Mr. Weir? No damage to the car, just a lot of annoyance.”

He was referring to a prank we had pulled our freshman year. We had a shop teacher named Mr. Weir, who was a total caveman. For two weeks he kept telling me that he was sure a slot in home ec would open up soon, no matter how many times I told him I had signed up for shop on purpose. When he refused to accept my class project, claiming I must have had my dad do it for me, I got Brucey to bump the lock on the shop garage after school and dropped a Ping-Pong ball into the fuel line of the senior class’s year-long restoration project.

The first time Mr. Weir took it out on the road, it drove fine … for a while. Once the ball got sucked into the fuel line, it would clog and stall. Without the car running, the ball would
drop, so there was nothing wrong with the line when he checked it. As far as I know, he never figured out what was wrong or who had done it. I certainly didn’t volunteer any information; by that time I was across the hall playing with my Easy-Bake Oven like a good little girl.

Like I said, I’m a car guy’s kid.

“That only works with classics. New cars have filters that prevent things from falling into the line and clogging them—and don’t bother mixing the gas with sugar or linseed oil. It’s not reliable, and it could damage more than Brooks’ reputation. We don’t want collateral damage. Besides, the car’s locked up inside the house’s security system in the garage. We can’t get to it. What are you playing with? Putting his head on someone else again?”

Brucey had tuned me out, focusing squarely on his screen for longer than I thought his attention span was capable of lasting.

“I am not a one-trick pony,” he said. (I assume that was another of those weird expressions he picked up from watching old movies in his sleep.) “I have new wallpaper. Check your phone.”

His ringtone went off in my pocket, earning me a high-pitched and half-sung “Yay, it worked!” from Brucey. I opened the incoming message to a phonecam video of Brooks’ perp walk with security at the mall. The whole thing lasted less than ten seconds, but it was a perfect shot of Brooks’ face with that “Busted” look.

“I made an avatar-sized one, too, if you’re interested.”

“I’ll be interested when you tell me you’ve done something
useful.” As much as I loved the camera work, it wasn’t getting me any closer to my goal.

“Trust me, it’ll be useful, but not until Monday. For now, your guy’s got an interview with a college representative on Wednesday.”

“He’s not
my
guy,” I growled. (Literally. I felt the rumble in my rib cage.)

“No, your guy is the hot one who practically lives in my backyard.”

“Stop trying to set me up with your cousin, Tabs. I’ve been telling you no since he set the front yard on fire and called it a valentine.”

“I’m not talking about Greg,” Tabs said. “And it
was
a Valentine. It was shaped like a heart. I’m talking about your man of many names from the mall.”

“Dex?”

“I figured out why he looked so familiar—he lives half a block over from me, right on the other side of the Massey/Peete dividing line. Three houses closer and he’d have been in middle school with us. I could hop the back fence and spy on his room.”

“You didn’t.”

“Of course not,” she said. “He’s got curtains. I could sneak you in the back door if you want, though. He actually hid a key under the mat. Who does that?”

“Step away from the stove, Tabs. You’ve inhaled too many fumes.”

The oven timer dinged and she pounced before the cupcakes had a chance to overheat by even a second. If they tasted
like they smelled when she opened the oven, this plan had a real chance of success. The whole kitchen filled with the scent of warm chocolate, without a single note of anything extra.

“Speaking of changing the subject,” Brucey broke in without bothering to look up. “Are we back on track? Yes? Good. As I was saying, our maniac in the making has an interview on Wednesday, and another on Friday. I’m thinking we send each a note and switch days so he shows up at the wrong one.”

One of those “very” things that defines Brucey is also his ability to be very annoying. It doesn’t help that he’s usually right.

“Better idea—leave his calendar alone. Email them both and say something’s come up and could they please reschedule for Monday afternoon. With a big shot like Brooks’ dad paying the bill for whatever college he signs on to, they’ll do it. They’ll think he blew them off, not to mention ruining whatever they moved off their schedule to clear the time slot. His dad should love that.”

“Nice.”

And Brucey was off again, clacking keys in whatever zone he entered when there was a computer screen in front of his face.

“The idea that you might someday be responsible for the well-being of your own children is terrifying. Really, it is,” Tabs said.

“Like knowing how to make ‘special’ cupcakes makes you mommy material.”

“Meanwhile: boys don’t make passes at girls who kick asses.” She jabbed a trout at me.

Brucey quotes movies; Tabs generally sticks to things she’s read on T-shirts and bumper stickers.

I would have done more than stick my tongue out at her, but my phone picked that moment to ring with the tone I’d assigned to Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen.

“Pick it up,” Tabs mouthed as she fanned her cupcakes with her fish hands.

Brucey was sitting up straight; he shut his computer so he could watch. Everyone knew that tone by heart now.

There was nothing so simple or difficult as answering that ring. Over the course of my stay, the phone had become both my nemesis and my lifeline; it made me so nervous I didn’t even want to handle it unless it rang. Uncle Paul would only call if he wasn’t in Claire’s room, because cell phones weren’t allowed up there. And if he’d left the room to call, then something had happened he thought I needed to know. Whatever news waited on the other side of the Talk button was either very good or very bad, and I didn’t trust my luck or my karma.

I let the phone ring again, staring at the photo of my aunt’s and uncle’s smiling faces that popped up on-screen with the tone, and took a deep breath before answering. Every possible piece of news had already passed through my imagination anyway. Worst-case scenario, he was only repeating something I’d already told myself.

“Hello?”

The block of ice that had been growing in my stomach started to thaw as I listened to my uncle’s voice. My cheeks grew hot until I knew they were turning red, and I felt the sting in my eyes that meant they were likely heading that way, too.

“Okay, bye,” I said, and hung up the phone. I laid it on the table, daring it to ring again.

“What?” Tabs asked, cringing against what I suppose my
reaction made her think was bad news, but it wasn’t. I was so jumbled up and turned around inside that I’d responded with tears instead of a smile.

“They say she’s showing signs of moving toward consciousness.” I parroted back my uncle’s words just as he’d said them, barely believing they were possible. While my luck was on a downward slide, Claire’s was holding steady. “One of her monitors is picking up increased brain activity.… They think Claire’s got a chance of waking up.”

All the tears I’d stopped crying when I first read Claire’s diary rushed to my eyes at once, and I was hit from both sides by sets of arms in black sleeves. Tabs’ fish mitts crossed under my chin, while Brucey had us both surrounded.

It wasn’t until that exact second that I realized that in my head and my heart, I’d already seen her as dead. I’d written her recovery off as impossible, and I was trying to make up for her not being there anymore, because I couldn’t convince myself she would be. I was avenging a death that might not happen.

But now, there was a real shot of her opening her eyes and her mouth and telling people what I was trying to force Brooks to confess. If we were lucky, maybe she’d snap out of it in time to see his future go down in flames as hers pulled out of them. It could even speed her recovery if I was able to tell her there was one fewer obstacle waiting for her outside the hospital. All I had to do was hang on a little longer.

The rest of the weekend crawled by between calls to Oregon to give my parents updates on Claire, even though most of the time it was just me saying “Nothing’s changed” or “They’re still waiting to see what happens.” I should probably say to give my
dad
updates, because despite my mother’s continuing to fill my in-box with messages I didn’t open, she never once answered the phone at home. She also never asked to talk to me when I was on with Dad and she was in the room—speaking loud enough that I could hear her.

While Uncle Paul barely spent enough time at the house to make sure I hadn’t somehow knocked it down, Brucey, Tabs, and I finalized our plans with a to-do list full of problematic emails and a possible means of reaching Brooks that didn’t involve destroying the Veyron. One last trip to the hospital to assure Claire that everything was going well, and I set out for school Monday morning with a real smile and a plastic-wrapped chocolate cat cupcake. (I had to confiscate the recipe magazine for Tabs’ own good. We were nearing the point of sprinkles and/or glitter, and that was a step too far, even in the name of righteous vengeance.)

Reality had settled firmly into a new normal. When I pulled through Lowry’s security gate, no one snuck looks at me while pretending to read things on their clipboard. No one showed the annoyed, glazed suspicion that questioned whether I’d
pulled off the highway to ask for directions. That was the kind of thing reserved for used-to-be public school girls being dropped off in their father’s circa 1976 Ford pickup or being picked up by an overpierced and undertanned Goth whose attitude counted as a visible accessory. I was just another bleach-blond Lowry girl in a nice car. The only reason I even rated a blip on the guards’ radar was because one of them had to step out of the guardhouse to stick a permit on my windshield.

But on the inside … on the inside I was still me, and I was far more confused than I should have been.

No matter how many pep talks I gave myself, that annoying seed of … I don’t even know what to call it. Maybe compassion, maybe understanding, or maybe it was the first hint that I was falling off that ledge Tabs kept warning me about, but it was the same feeling that had manifested when I was sitting next to Brooks in his garage hiding from raindrops. I actually felt bad about what I was planning, and that was a feeling I couldn’t tolerate. It made me want to toss the cupcake in the nearest garbage can and tell Brooks he needed to contact those two college recruiters before he missed them both and had no way to escape his dad.

I pulled my Mustang into an empty spot near the fence and slammed the door, hoping if I chipped the paint it would generate enough anger to pull me through the homestretch. But that idea didn’t last five seconds past my feet hitting the asphalt.

“Dinah!”

I knew the voice without turning around, and honestly, that was my first impulse. I wanted to spin right there in the middle of the parking lot and smile at Dex when he called my name.
(And for a girl who usually has to make a conscious decision to turn her lips up, that’s a weird feeling.) I wanted to walk to the building with him the same way we’d covered most of the school my first day, but I couldn’t. I had to be upset with him for not sticking around to defend his best friend at the mall. Which meant that at the same moment I was reminding myself to loathe Brooks’ very existence, I had to pretend to be completely on his side.