Premeditated (9 page)

“Oh yeah. She was furious—especially when she found out that the bitter orange she takes for her stomach could do the same thing. Mom went on a two-day Google binge looking up anything and everything that could create a false positive. If your body chemistry’s right, even Advil can sink you.”

“Somehow I can’t see Brooks agreeing to down a whole bottle of Advil, either,” I said.

“What has living on the other coast done to your brain cells?” Tabs opened a packet of sugar from the tray and dumped it into her pudding cup. “Herbal remedies are capsules full of powder,” she said as she stirred it in. “Presto, change-o, rearrange-o. No one knows the difference, and Boy Wonder’s left with a lovely black mark on his permanent record.”

Then she wadded up the sugar packet and flicked it right between my eyes.

Maybe I had a plan after all.

Six desserts later (Tabs made another pudding run), we had the beginnings of an idea. It involved sports drinks and the hope that bitter orange tasted enough like regular orange that it wouldn’t tip anyone off who happened to drink it.

Not much, but at least it was another step.

By the time Uncle Paul opened the door to Claire’s room, the Lowry stuff was back in my bag, Tabs’ notes were tucked away, and we had removed all evidence of criminal mischief except the pudding cups.

“Hi, Mr. Reed,” Tabs said. “I stole pudding. Want one?”

“Maybe later,” he said. “And I’ve told you that you can call me Paul.”

“I’ve called you Mr. Reed since I was four. It sounds weird.”

“Does that mean I need to start calling you Glam—”

“No!” Tabs jumped up. “It’s not necessary to repeat that name in its entirety ever again.” She grabbed her keys and the empty pudding containers. “I’ll just go dispose of these and get out of the way so there’s no chance of hearing it. Ever. Again.”

Uncle Paul grinned; Aunt Helen drifted across the room and perched on the chair beside Claire’s bed. This was the first time she had been away from Claire’s room for longer than forty-five minutes since Claire was hospitalized. In the few days since I’d been back, she’d aged ten years.

“Bye, Tabs,” I said.

“Bye, D, Mr.… er … Paul, Helen. If the Cuckoo bird comes to while I’m gone, tell her I was here, okay?”

“Sure.” I nodded.

“Tomorrow?” she asked.

“At the house.”

And then she was gone, leaving me, Claire, Uncle Paul, Aunt Helen, and the quiet no one knew how to break. For hours, I did my homework at the table until I couldn’t stand the vacuum anymore.

“The school sent papers for you to sign,” I said, but the world was stuck on pause.

Uncle Paul bobbed his head, not really agreeing or even listening. He turned his attention from Aunt Helen and Claire to some random spot out the window, as though the clouds would give him something to say.

A nurse came in. She did the things you come to think of as routine while you’re in a hospital: checked Claire’s vitals, copied numbers off the machines by her bed, adjusted her pillows so Claire wasn’t lying in the same position anymore. This time she had a guy in a lab coat with her. He drew a tube of blood and scanned Claire’s wristband to make a label for it. The shift change must have clued Uncle Paul in to how late it was.

“Helen, I’m taking Dinah back to the house,” he said when they left, and I wondered if substituting “house” for “home” was intentional. Right now, it was just a building where they kept their furniture. It wouldn’t be a home until Claire came back. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”

Aunt Helen didn’t answer; she kept staring at Claire.

“D, grab your stuff. Let’s go.”

The drive to Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen’s house was grueling, even in a Land Rover. The car itself was comfortable enough, but the atmosphere was heavy and full of half-formed sentences and things we each thought we might say but never actually voiced.

“So … um … how was school?” He reached for the burger bag he’d tossed onto the dash after our pit stop for dinner and fished out the one stamped “No Onions.” That’s how I knew things were worse than he was letting on. Normally, all Uncle Paul will eat on Friday is fish. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would make him feel worse.

“Fine.”

“Just like Claire. That’s all she ever tells me, too.” He laughed a little; the light came back into his face but faded as soon as he realized what he’d said. “I’m sorry.… I’m really bad at this.”

“No you’re not. We just need a safe topic.” Maybe if we kept Claire off the table, there’d be some semblance of normalcy for both of us.

“Okay. How about … well, I’m not asking you about boys.”

“Please don’t.” The less said about Brooks, Dex, and any connection between the two to my underwear, the better. I was surprised the school hadn’t already ratted me out to my aunt and uncle for the striptease.

“So what’s a safe topic?” he asked.

“Is it okay if someone comes to the house this weekend?” I asked, then filled my mouth with a bite of my burger.

“Tabs and Brucey are always welcome. You don’t have to ask.”

“What about someone from Lowry?”

“Sure.” Uncle Paul was terrible at hiding the surprise in his voice. “I’m glad you’re okay … with Lowry and all. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea or not, but if you’re already making friends—”

“More tutor than friend.”

“Why do you need a tutor your first day?”

“Because Lowry’s way ahead of … well, pretty much anything I’ve ever seen. And aside from the fact that the classes were—
mostly
—taught in English, all I heard was ‘Wah-wah-wah,’ like from a Peanuts cartoon.”

“Do you need me to help you? High school’s a bit far back, but I wasn’t too bad a student.”

He wasn’t too bad the way Abigail-not-Abby thought our teachers were slow. Uncle Paul’s a certified genius.
Certified
. With an actual certificate, and a special card in his wallet from some genius club that only like one in a million people qualify for.

“One of the guys in my class said he’d come by on Sunday, if that’s okay?”

“Ah. Gotcha,” Uncle Paul said. “I’m pretty sure we already covered the ‘I won’t ask you about boys’ rule, so we’ll just stop here so I can say yes to your
tutor
coming to the house. And I can go back to pretending you’re still my little niece who thinks boys are icky and trips them into the mud.”

“Thanks, Uncle Paul.”

“My little niece has a playdate at two with her little friend who happens to be a little boy. Yep. All is right in my world.”

Pretending Claire and I weren’t growing up wasn’t as much of an act as he made it sound. He took mention of a teen boy in his house as reason to turn the radio to the nineties station
and sing along with Nirvana at the top of his lungs. I guess his genius card didn’t come with a guarantee of common sense.

At the house, Uncle Paul didn’t pull around front, like usual; he pulled up to the garage, where he kept the cars he didn’t drive so much as tinker with and look at on occasion. Yes,
cars
, plural. When the money started flowing, Aunt Helen bought a house; he bought cars.

“I was going to mention this sooner,” he said. “But your dad asked me to wait until after he was gone so he’d have plausible deniability if anyone asked.”

Anyone meaning my mother, no doubt.

“Your aunt and I got you something for your birthday, but we didn’t have a way to get it out to Oregon.” He pulled a key fob from his pocket and hit the lock on it. Halfway down the first row a set of headlights blinked on and off with the usual horn blast.

“You got me a car?”

“We tried,” he said.

Uncle Paul was nervous. I could tell by the way he kept hitting his toe against the cement floor and the way he wouldn’t look at me. Hopefully, he’d get to do this with Claire in a couple of years, but if not, he was trying to salvage something normal. The car wasn’t just a birthday gift; it was one last chance for us to be anything close to the way we were before.

If I rejected the gift that my mother had obviously refused to let him and Aunt Helen give me, I was turning my back on them again. Dad had already cast his vote, and given me permission to take an act of kindness in the spirit in which it was
meant rather than as the act of war Mom always tried to turn things into.

“It’s not pink, is it?” I asked.

The grin I got in response made me feel like I was back in the life I’d had before the move.

“Take a look,” he said, tossing me the keys. “Your aunt picked out the key chain, so any retaliatory gestures can be directed her way. I take no responsibility for the matching house key, either.”

Aunt Helen had gone all out and gotten the “designer” keys. Mine were black with red and gold stars covered in glitter that matched the key chain—a bird with my name written across them in gold scroll. Seeing “Dinah” engraved on something for a change was nice.

“She tried to find a dodo bird but had to settle for the dove.”

“They’re great,” I said, jingling the keys. “My favorite colors and everything.”

“Hmmm.” Uncle Paul scowled. “Maybe we should have gotten a black car, then.”

It occurred to me that I hadn’t actually moved yet. I was still standing by the door, and my neither-pink-nor-black mystery car was waiting somewhere in the mix for me to find it.

I waded into what would have been a slice of Dad’s heaven, and then I saw it.
My baby
. Gunmetal-blue without so much as a fingerprint on the finish, sitting right next to the beat-up old truck Dad loved too much to take to Oregon, where Mom would have sold it for scrap.

“I know it’s not the one you and your dad have been working on, but you don’t need to be tethered to us while you’re
here. With me and Helen going back and forth to the hospital—”

“I don’t mind going to the hospital,” I said.

“But it shouldn’t be the
only
place you go. Whether you’re here for a few days, a few weeks, or whatever else we’re able to work out, you should at least have the kind of freedom that comes with blowing out all sixteen candles on your cake.”

“It took two tries. Dad sabotaged me by stealing frosting.”

“Then it’s a good thing I wasn’t there to see you lose on a technicality,” he said.

None of them had been there at all. I’d gotten a card, a phone call from Aunt Helen, and a long IM rant from Claire about how angry she was when they’d canceled their trip at the last minute. She’d just gotten her Lowry uniform and wanted to show it off. She hadn’t understood why they couldn’t come, and honestly, neither had I, but now it made perfect sense.

“Helen had it all planned. She wanted to mail you the key so you could open it on your birthday, but you lived so far away, and—”

“And Mom said no, didn’t she?”

There was no way distance had kept Uncle Paul from giving me my car; he wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t been certain he could get it to me. And there was no way my mother would have let him. Not a new car. Not
this
car. Especially not this car from him and Aunt Helen.

“I’m sure she has her reasons, Dinah.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make excuses for her. Everyone does, and she uses that as permission to keep doing things that need excusing.”

I couldn’t shake the possibility that Mom’s birthday tantrum was what had put Claire over the line. Claire had been counting on seeing me, storing up all the things she didn’t want to say on the phone to tell me in person. I was her safety net, and Mom’s fit cut it out from under her.

My mood shift sort of put a damper on the whole new-car moment, but I indulged Uncle Paul’s forced enthusiasm, sitting behind the wheel so he could take a picture to show Aunt Helen.

I’m sure he thought I’d take the Mustang out for a spin and maybe not come home until after midnight, but I was exhausted. I didn’t want to go anywhere other than straight to bed, so once I’d waved Uncle Paul back down the driveway, I left the garage and let myself into the house with my brand-new red and black key.

The room Aunt Helen had fixed up for me was technically the guest room, but she had decorated it with me in mind—probably the day after Mom announced we were moving and Aunt Helen began her “Keeping Dinah” campaign. It was on the second floor, closer to the stairs than Claire’s, which had the big window, and it was the most “me” place I had ever seen.

Dark carpet, purple walls with black lace curtains, and furniture that looked like it came out of the Baroque period. Aunt Helen’s Goth was actually Gothic.

I toed off my shoes and buried my feet in the high pile, then dug some pj’s out of the dresser (peach is not the same thing as pink, thank you very much) and dragged my phone out of my bag to text Tabs. But as soon as I switched the power on, it began to vibrate in my hand and the screen lit up with a number I knew by heart.

“Hi, Mom,” I answered.

“Where have you been? I’ve been calling you since this afternoon. Your father told me about the new phone.”

Traitor
.

I had switched the SIM card so I could keep my old number and files; there was no reason for Dad to say anything unless she needled it out of him. But I guess he figured it was better to mention the phone than the Mustang.

“I went to the hospital,” I said. “You have to turn your phone off inside.”

“Did Paul pick you up from school?”

“No.”

“Don’t give me the dramatic sigh.”

“Is Dad home yet?” I asked.

“And don’t try and get me off the phone!” She was yelling. Not quite the speed record, but close.

“All I did was ask you if Dad’s plane had landed.”

“I’m sure he called you first thing,” she said smugly.

“My phone was off, Mom.”

“I’ve told you that you’re not to turn your phone off when you’re not at home, Dinah Rain.”

“Hospital rules, Mom. Cell phones screw up the equipment.”

“Don’t think you can use that sort of language just because you’re on the other side of the continent, young lady.”

“Don’t” is my mother’s favorite word. Most people pepper their speech with “like” or “you know” on the pauses; Mom fills in empty space with “don’t.” Don’t make noise. Don’t get dirty. Don’t wear that. Don’t eat on the furniture. Don’t take your dolls off the shelf. Don’t go outside. Don’t bring people to the house if they’re not her definition of normal.