Premeditated (23 page)

I thought I was going to faint straight out of my seat when he looked up and our eyes met; I think my heart stopped for a beat or two before it sank in that he wasn’t calling me out for the traffic stop.

“W-was it ever funny?” I asked, praying the hitch in my throat didn’t actually make it into my voice.

“No, but until now, I thought this was some idiot trying to show off. I thought they’d get bored and move on to someone else if I didn’t retaliate or give them any attention. My own father thinks I’m an addict … how is that a joke?”

It wasn’t, but it was coming very close to justice. I even let myself hope that Brooks would be leaving Lowry before me, and I’d have however many days between his expulsion and Claire’s return to actually enjoy myself with Abigail-not-Abby at lunch or hang out with Dex.

“Who does something like this?” Brooks’ rant had continued while I zoned out. “Both of my top college picks have probably blackballed me. Headmistress Kuykendall informed me that I’m on strike two and one short step from being kicked out of here, which means I’m half that far from being kicked out of my house, as Dad says I’m a disgrace to my mother’s memory. I have a police report with my name on it. I have an arrest record. They ask that when you get a job, don’t they?”

He groaned, grabbing the sides of his head with his hands.

“Why is this happening to me?”

“Psycho ex-girlfriend?” I suggested.

“I don’t date psychos. I don’t even know any psychos.”

That was an interesting thought. I’d heard Brucey talk about his sessions with Dr. Useless and all the things he’d learned snooping through her office when she had to leave to take calls or other quick emergencies. She had a patient who would black out and wake up hours later with no memory of what he’d done, even horrible or dangerous things. Maybe that was what was wrong with Brooks. Multiple personalities would go a long way toward explaining why the Brooks I’d seen and spoken to
was nothing like the one in Claire’s letters. And if that was it, at least his dad had the cash to get him serious help.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked as Mr. Cavanaugh called time on the last presentation and made us start class for real.

“Yeah, I do.”

“I think you’re about the only one.”

Our conversation ended there, replaced by Mr. Cavanaugh’s insistence that everyone line up on either side of the stage for what he called “drama drills” (charades for a grade). The rest of last period ticked by sixty seconds at a time while we pulled every identity from space cowboy to beached mermaid out of a hat in an attempt to get our character across. (No, it wasn’t funny when Jordan drew “the Venus de Milo,” pulled her arms in her sleeves, and Dex yelled out “Dinah’s first day” as his guess.)

I was anxious to get home and fill Tabs and Brucey in on how well things were going. We’d finally made progress, and Brooks was becoming acquainted with that suffocating crush that had plagued my every moment since I’d first found his name on Claire’s computer. When the bell finally released us for the day, I was ready to skip the stage steps and jump into the pit just to shorten the wait that much more, but I forced myself to stay inconspicuous.

Brooks beat me back to our seats, and by the time I got there he had my bag in his hand stuffing something under the front flap.

“What are you doing?”

He froze with his back to me, and I watched his ears turn red the way my dad’s do when he’s embarrassed. A folded piece of blue paper was in his hand.

“I wanted to give you something, but now it feels stupid,” he said, facing me. “I was trying to sneak it into your bag so you wouldn’t see me with it.”

“What is it?”

“Probably me losing whatever shred of sanity I had left before today. I had a lot of wait time at the hospital this morning; I couldn’t think of anything else to do with it that didn’t involve self-mutilation and a longer stay in the hospital.”

He shoved the page into my hand.

“Don’t open that until I’m out of here. And I’m sorry I can’t draw people.”

Brooks snatched up his stuff and bolted without bothering to put the strap from his bag over his shoulder.

The folded page stayed clutched in my hand, slightly rumpled from the way he’d crushed it trying to fit it into my bag. I opened it, dreading whatever poisonous viper inside would explain the sudden change in Brooks’ skin tone. After all, there wasn’t much chance of this being a signed confession.

It was my tree house.

Brooks had drawn the tree house from Uncle Paul’s backyard, finished it and made into the kind of palace Dad had dreamed of building, complete with a tower. There was an arrow pointing to the rear, labeled “Broom Parking in Back,” and where we’d taken the pulley up, it read “Flight Pad: No Mortals Allowed.” Instead of a rope, the pulley had been threaded with the braid coming off the head of a stick-figure princess leaning out the window. He’d even remembered the dish for the TV.

Tabs was going to kill me.

Three days was a record for me keeping a secret from Tabs, and I think the only reason I lasted that long was because I forgot I’d stuck Brooks’ drawing in my bag after the first one.

For those three days, I went to class, failed most of them miserably, pretended to listen to Abigail-not-Abby at lunch, and consider meeting Dex when he got off his shift at the fairgrounds, all between running to the hospital, only to be told there’d been no change with Claire, and waiting for word of Brooks’ drug test failure.

The short version on that one is: TV lies. Drug tests take days, not hours. This was not a pleasant discovery. Waiting made me sloppy and forgetful.

“You’ll be lucky if they get results in under a week,” Tabs said as we headed back to Uncle Paul’s house from one of those pointless hospital treks. “If his dad’s like you say, he probably wanted the detailed kind that only like two labs in the country can do.”

She followed that with a request for gum, which I told her to get out of my bag. Tabs dumped it out in the seat between us, and that forgotten piece of blue paper fell out with everything else.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I tried to grab it, but the car swerved and I had to put both hands back on the wheel.

“
He
did this, didn’t he? Because of the lip lock in the tree.”

“What difference does it make?” I asked, and made another grab. She held it out of reach. “Give it back.”

Instead, she unfolded it to let it flap over the side of the car, where the wind tattered the top. I made a grab for it again, not really sure why I cared what she was going to do with my picture.

“You have to destroy it, Dinah.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t hang on to things created by your sworn enemy,” she said.

“He doesn’t know we’re enemies. He thought he was being nice.”

“And I’m getting the feeling that
you
think it’s nice, too. He’s sucking you in. It’s like those movies where a bunch of kids stumble on an evil artifact and one sneaks it home without telling the others. They start acting all weird because it connects them to thing trying to kill them. Destroy it.”

“I don’t care who made it—I like it.”

It was what Dad would have made me if Mom hadn’t got in the way. My appreciation of the image had nothing to do with the person who had created it. Maybe.

“I care,” she said, crushing the page, and the dream it held, into a ball.

“Tabs!”

“I care because this is not helpful. This is a distraction. This is him baiting the hook and you falling for it.”

“It’s a piece of paper with pencil scratches on it, not GHB in a Coke.”

“No, this is a problem, and the only way to handle problems is to get rid of them.”

She let it drop. In a matter of seconds, my tree palace was flying through the air behind us, to land somewhere on the side of the road in an overgrown ditch full of stagnant rainwater. There was no chance of saving it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I coasted the car onto the shoulder and jumped out, hoping there was something left, but it was floating out of reach.

I tried snapping off a stick to draw it closer, because I couldn’t tell how deep the ditch was or if there was anything alive in it.

“Look at yourself,” Tabs ordered. She pried my hand out of the muck and held it in front of my face, shaking it so that grimy bits of water hit me in the nose. “You’re fried, D. You need a break.”

“I’ll take a break once I’m done with Brooks. Once he’s gone, I’ll stop going to class until Lowry calls Uncle Paul to tell him they’ve removed me from the roster for truancy. Satisfied?”

“No. You’re coming with me and we’re going to do something crazy like normal teenage girls with a car, cash, and no adult supervision.”

“The only place I’m going is home.” I threw my stick down and pulled my feet out of the slosh, shaking them to get the mud off.

“Are you seriously pouting because of this?”

“I am not pouting!”

Does anyone not say, or at least not think, that when they’re accused of pouting? Especially if it’s true.

I trudged back to my car and slammed the door. Tabs slammed hers a second later, so we were both sitting in my front seat, arms crossed, scowling at the road like the next exit sign was to blame for all of this. Arguments we weren’t actually
having grew in my head (I won all of them—home court advantage). I glared at Tabs, Tabs glared at me, and we got absolutely nowhere.

She was right. I was fried.

“I’m sorry,” she spat, finally breaking our mutual ignore-a-thon.

“Shhh.”

“You don’t shush someone who’s apologizing!”

“Shhh!”

“Fine! I’ll walk home!” She opened her door and got out.

“Shut up and listen.” I cocked my head to the side toward the faint sound of something familiar.

“Is that—” Tabs got quiet.

“Uncle Paul’s ringtone! Where’s my phone? Do you see it?”

The argument was forgotten on the spot. We shoveled through everything that had spilled out of my bag, checking between the seats and under them, searching for the phone, which was already on its third ring. When it hit four, it would go to voice mail, and if Uncle Paul had left Claire’s room to call me again, I didn’t want to get whatever news he had to share by checking messages that would no doubt include a dozen or more angry rants from my mother.

“Got it!” Tabs wriggled the phone out from where it had wedged between her seat and the console and tossed it to me. She started clicking her fingernails against her teeth.

“Hello?” I said carefully. “Are you there?”

Uncle Paul’s voice came through, speaking quickly, and probably all in one breath. When he was done, I didn’t even remember to press End to hang up.

“She woke up!” I screamed it so loud into the phone that I probably busted my dad’s eardrum.

When Uncle Paul called to say Claire had opened her eyes—actually focused her eyes and looked at him and Aunt Helen—my voice went up two octaves and got three times louder. I must have taken my hands off the wheel at some point, too, because Tabs had sretched across the center line and grabbed it.

“Dinah!” she shouted as she leaned out of her seat belt. “Can you maybe find a way to tell your dad about Claire that doesn’t land us in the room next to hers?”

She squeaked as the Mustang drifted a little too close to the next lane. In my ear, Dad was firing questions about Claire and traffic at the same time.

“I’ve got the wheel, Dad,” I said. “Both hands, I swear. I was just excited.”

“Then pull over and be excited on the shoulder,” he scolded.

“Sorry, Dad—I’ve switched it to hands-free.” Hands-free meaning I shoved the phone at Tabs and she held it against my ear while I steered the car. “We can talk now.”

“Tabitha, are her hands on the wheel?” he shouted. I’m not sure if he was afraid Tabs couldn’t hear him or if his own hearing was still off from my announcement.

“Yes, Mr. Powell,” Tabs said.

“Are you lying?”

“No, Mr. Powell.”

“Good,” Dad said, satisfied. “Are you girls headed to the hospital?”

“We were, but the doctors won’t let more than two people in at a time, so I can’t see her yet. Claire only opened her eyes for a minute or so, and she’s really confused about what’s going on and where she is, but she knew her name and recognized Aunt Helen. They said things are—and I quote—‘cautiously optimistic.’ Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul want to be there when she wakes up again to see if she can tell them anything about what happened the night she fell. Unless they call, I’m not going over there until tomorrow.”

“Let me know how things go, D. I’ll look into getting a flight back there as soon as she’s up and around.”

“Dad … does this mean I have to come back to Oregon now? Mom said I could only stay until Claire got better, and she’s already bugging me about coming home, but I don’t want to leave yet. I haven’t even gotten to talk to Claire, and I don’t know how long she’ll be in the hospital.”

If the doctors really did decide to move Claire up to the psych ward, then she wouldn’t get visitors for at least a couple of days while the counselors tried to get her to talk to them. They might let one of her parents in, but not me. After all the time I’d spent waiting to see Claire and hear her actually say something beyond the words I assigned her voice in my head, I couldn’t leave before I got to see her.

“I wish you’d told me your mother was giving you a hard time, D,” Dad said.

“She always gives me a hard time.”

“But this time, I know why—I’ve been talking to Helen. She said having you around was her life preserver. It reminded her there was some light in the world.”

“When did you talk to Aunt Helen?”

She never left the hospital, and Dad hadn’t been alone with her while he was there.

“There’s not a lot for her to do while she sits in that room with Claire, so she’s been trying to work out a way for you to stay there.”

Tabs cleared her throat, the way she does when she thinks she’s hearing something she shouldn’t. I took the phone from her and switched it to the ear nearest the door.