“Oh, is that all?” He grins, trusting me completely, and I kinda hate myself. “We have notebook paper in the desk upstairs.”
We walk back to the phones together, and the guilt winding through me makes me smile a little brighter and laugh a little louder. Pretty soon, I forget that I'm only pretending to enjoy his company. Liam regales me with stories of the geese setting up camp on his porch, and I double over, clutching my stomach, wiping my eyes. I haven't laughed this hard since before the scandal with my mom broke.
It's not that Liam is that funny. Maybe I just needed to laugh. And somehow, in his presence, I can.
What are you doing?
a voice inside me asks.
You're not here to make friends. You're here to find Mom's letter. To investigate Dad's claims.
For once, I box up the voice and stick it in a far corner of my mind. Everything the voice is saying is true. But there will be other shifts at the hotline. And this Sunday, I'll be completely on my own. Plenty of time to walk around between calls. Plenty of time to peruse a box papered with a certain pattern.
Plenty of time to uncover my mother's secrets.
Chapter 7
“CeCe, wait!” Sam rolls up to me the next day after school, stopping short of crashing into the side of my car, a secondhand forest-green Camry. The radio doesn't work, stuffing's coming out of the seats, and scrapes and scratches riddle the exterior. But it's mine.
More importantly, it wasn't my mother's. And I never have to wonder what did or didn't happen in the backseat.
“You've been avoiding me,” Sam pants, and he's right. We haven't spoken for over a week.
Today, instead of Rollerblades, he's on an aluminum scooter, the kind with three wheels and a handlebar. His face is red, and he's decked out in his safety gear. By all rights, he should look ridiculous.
Instead, he's adorable. Like makes-you-want-to-grab-his-helmet-and-kiss-him adorable. And judging from the sideways glances the girls in the parking lot are shooting him, I'm not the only one who thinks so. No doubt he's had plenty of offers to patch up his boo-boos this last week.
“Not that I blame you,” he says. “I'm so sorry, CeCe. I was such a jerk. I can't believe I said all that stuff to you about the suicide, not realizing it was your mom.”
I wrench my eyes from his lips. “So now you know?”
“Yes.” From the way he drops his gaze, I can tell he knows all of it. Not just the suicide, but also the affair with Tommy Farrow. Hell, maybe he's even lined his locker with Tabitha Brooks's faculty photo, as was the fad among the football team last year.
I turn and shove my key into the car door. “Fine. Apology accepted. You can leave now.”
He can walk away from my car, forever, and it shouldn't matter. He was just a momentary blip in my life, nothing more. But sorrow drags at me, and I can't help but think of what could've been. If he weren't writing that article. If he had never found out about my past. If I could have had a fresh start with him, like everyone else.
I wait for his footsteps, for the thud of the scooter hitting pavement. But they don't come.
Instead, he places his palm flat against my car window, keeping the door closed. “CeCe, this doesn't change the way I think about you. Not one bit.”
I stare at his hand. Ink stains his fingers, and a callous bulges on his middle finger from gripping his pencil too tightly. Does he mean it? Despite everything he's heard, am I still the “blank slate” girl he met on the first day of school?
Not that it matters. Even if he is sorry, his goal is to write a kick-ass article. A story so big and spectacular the Winkelhake scholarship fund will have no choice but to take notice. So long as that's true, I can't get lost in his eyes, no matter how dreamy they are.
“I said you can go,” I repeat.
“If you really accepted my apology, you wouldn't make me leave.” He shifts his scooter from one hand to the other and takes a step closer, so that his shoulder brushes mine. “You'd let me stay and hang out. You might even do the citizens of Lakewood a big favor and give me a lift home. I almost gave a woman a heart attack this morning when I swerved into her lane.”
The corners of my lips quirk. I can't help it. It's like Sam knows exactly where my smiles have been hiding for the last six months, exactly how to laser in and dig them out.
“Okay,” I say, wondering if I'm going to regret it. “Hop in.”
* * *
By the time we pull up in front of his town house, with its blue siding and black shingles, I've stared small talk in the face and tried it on for size. To my surprise, it actually fits.
Sam tells me his impressions of the kids at school and how he got his internship at the
Lakewood Sun
. I tell him about the parties at the lake and how all the kids drag Main on Saturday nights. Of course, “all the kids” doesn't include me, at least not for the last six months, but I don't mention that.
“Thanks for the ride,” he says, his fingers hooked around the metal door handle.
But he doesn't pull the handle, and he doesn't leave. My heart pounds. His head nearly scrapes the roof of my car, and there's no more than two feet between us. In this enclosed space, our breaths flirt and intermingle in the air.
Kind of like us, if I can remember any tips from the teen magazines Alisara and I used to read.
“I don't know how to say this,” he begins.
“Go ahead, Sam.” I turn my entire body to face himâmy knees, shoulders, wristsâlike he is a sun lamp, and I am a flower.
“It's about your mom.”
Bam. Make that a wilted flower, whose petals are ripped apart by the gale. Of course it's about my mom. It's always about my mom.
“As you know, I've been researching the story of her suicide. And I came across something in my research that nobody could explain.”
“What is it?” I say dully, even though I can probably guess. I mean, there's lots that's inexplicable about my mom's behavior. Tons.
Like:
How could a grown woman be sexually attracted to a boy?
Or more importantly:
Why would she act on it?
And my personal favorite:
Did she have any kind of moral fiberâeven a few lost threadsâat all?
But Sam bypasses all the obvious questions and picks up a lock of my hair. I feel the slight tug all the way to my roots.
“Her hair.” He rubs
my
strands between his fingers, and I suppress a shiver. “It was chopped off, jagged. One article said it looked like it was lopped off with a butcher knife.”
I shrug, but even that simple movement is infused with the awareness of his touch. Still, he doesn't let go.
“They said she was crazy,” I say. “Out of her mind. Maybe she was disfiguring herself as a sign of her shame. Who knows what motivated her actions?”
But even as I repeat the explanation the detectives gave for just about everything, my dad's words echo in my mind:
I knew your mother. She wasn't capable of those things. I don't believe she did any of it.
All of a sudden, my excuses sound exactly like what they areâsurface-level assumptions designed to make it easier for the detectives to close the case.
Sam frowns. “I guess I could buy that if I hadn't seen the interview with her hair stylist in one of the local papers.”
Oh. One of those. Every newspaper in a fifty-mile radius went berserk when my mom committed suicide. Every day, there was a new article, featuring interviews with her fellow teachers, former students, even our lawn guy, for god's sake. If there was a story on her hair salon, I must've missed it.
“The stylist kept saying your mom's haircut was inconceivable, and I couldn't understand why. So when I was scooting past Cut & Dry the other day, I stopped to talk to her.”
“Did she confirm my mom was a natural redhead?” I raise my eyebrows. “Reveal the exact color of dye she used to cover her silver sparkles?”
“Not at all,” he says, and something about his tone stops me. The chill begins at the base of my spine and crawls its way up, one long spider leg at a time. “The stylist said she's been cutting your mom's hair for two decades. And in all that time, your mother never let her cut more than half an inch. In fact, she came into the salon two days before she died, and they had the exact same argument. The stylist tried to talk her into a bob, and your mom adamantly refused.”
Abruptly, he lets go of my hair, and the strands swing back over my shoulder, loose, unencumbered, and very, very cold.
Sam's eyes pierce right into me. “So what I want to know is: What could've happened in two days that made her change her mind? Unless . . . she didn't.”
Chapter 8
The phone's ringing. Of course it is. It's been ringing in my dreams all night, in one form or another. Sometimes I ignore it, and sometimes I pick it up. Sometimes I get my masturbating caller, and sometimes, it's my mother's hairstylist. Sometimes, the phone turns into a Venus flytrap and swallows my head whole.
I snuggle deeper into my sheets and prepare to drift off. The phone rings again. It's not the old-school “briiing-briiing” of the hotline or even the train whistle, guitar strum, or doorbell that my cell phone used to emit on a regular basis. I don't use personalized ring tones for my friends anymore, because, well, I don't have friends. But I've kept the “suspense” tone for my unknown callers, and that's what I'm hearing in my dream now . . .
My eyes pop open. Because the ring is followed by a vibration that rattles my entire nightstand, and my dreams never employ that many senses at once.
It's not a dream.
I grapple for my cell phone and manage to pick it up on the fifth ring. “Hello? Hello?”
Nothing. No words, at least. Just breathing so heavy I can almost feel the fog condensing through the phone lines.
I hang up. It's an automatic reaction. Maybe I'm being paranoid. Maybe it's due to Sam's words whispering in and out of my consciousness all night. But I can't stay on the line listening to that breathing one second longer.
The phone rings again. Same “suspense” shrill. Same chainsaw rattling. I push the button to decline the call.
It rings again. I decline. And again. I decline. And again. I decline. Andâ
I snatch up the phone. “What?! What do you want?”
A pause. And then a voice, so low I can't tell if it's male or female. “Wrong number. I was looking for the crisis hotline. Sorry.”
I hear a click, and then silence fills my ear, my mind, my room. It might as well be liquid concrete. I'm suddenly gasping, choking, fighting to fill my lungs with air.
Why is someone calling my cell phone, thinking it's the crisis hotline? The numbers are nothing alike. NOTHING.
No one's supposed to know I'm volunteering there. When I signed up as a call counselor, I made Mr. Willoughby promise not to tell. All I need is for one student to find out, and it'll spread through the school more quickly than any emergency response system.
Did you hear? Cecilia Brooks is volunteering at the hotline. Like mother, like daughter. Gee, I wonder if she'll start having sex there, too. Who's she going to prey on? A middle-schooler?
I force a shaky breath, climbing out of bed and dressing for the day. It could've been an honest mistake. Someone could've mistakenly hit “CeCe” instead of “Crisis” when dialing from their contacts.
Except I'm not on people's contact lists. Plus, I can see fat-fingering the wrong number once. But six times in a row? What are the chances?
* * *
By lunchtime, I have five more missed calls from five different numbers. Three voice mails, with three different voices. All of which say approximately the same thing: “Um, do I have the right number? Is this the crisis hotline?”
It got so bad I turned off the ringer, but like the Princess and the Pea, I can still feel the vibration through my backpack, where it rests at my feet, against my socks and shoes.
I'm seriously contemplating dropping my phone down a toilet when Mackenzie saunters to my locker. She's impeccably dressed, as always, but even the heavy concealer can't cover the circles under her eyes.
She hooks her arm through mine and leans in close, as if I'm one of her cohorts. “Did you know that new guy Sam is writing an article on your mom's suicide?” The spicy scent of her breath mints assaults me.
“I heard something about that, yeah.” I inch backward until I'm practically falling into my locker.
“Well, it took him about five seconds to find out I was dating Tommy when it happened. And now he's contacted me for an interview. Me! Can you believe the nerve of this guy? After what he did to me in front of the whole school?”
You mean, when he helped out a girl you were mercilessly bullying? Like you're trying to bully me now?
I force myself to stand up straight. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to tell him to back off.”
I shake my head. “Uh-uh. I don't tell Sam what to do. We barely know each other.”
It's partly true. I've talked to the guy a grand total of three times. And yet, I can still feel the tingle in my scalp from when he lifted the hair off my shoulders. Still feel the tug of my lips at the thought of his aluminum scooter and elbow pads.
Mackenzie's grip relaxes, and she takes a step back. “I can't let him dredge up the drama again. Those boys have finally graduated, and I was supposed to put it all behind me this year.”
I stumble, and my elbow hits the locker with a clang. Why, she must have been suffering, too. If I was teased as my mother's daughter, then she must have gotten flak as Tommy's girlfriend. No doubt it was more subtle, but people must have wondered. And whispered.
But just when I'm beginning to feel sorry for her, Mackenzie's features turn to plastic. “Get him to back off, CeCe. Otherwise, I'll tell him exactly what Tommy said to me about your mom. You don't want the sordid details in the
Lakewood Sun,
do you?”
“I . . . I thought Tommy never said anything,” I stutter. “You were as surprised as the rest of us.”
She sneers. “Sam doesn't know that, does he?”
She turns and stalks off, flicking at a poster taped to the wall. The action dislodges the poster, and I catch the paper as it drops to the floor.
Coincidentally, it's the same flyer advertising the crisis hotline. The one the striped-tights girl was hanging up on the first day of school. But this one's been altered. The space listing the hotline's phone number has been whited out. And a series of digits has been written over it. A very familiar series of digits. My phone number, to be precise.
I stare at the blocky figures written in orange permanent marker. How on earth did my phone number get on this flyer?
I'm cold, so cold, even as my body breaks out in sweat. So that's the reason all these people are calling my cell phone. Not a mistake, after all.
Someone placed my number there on purpose.
Which means, someone is out to get me. But why?
I think again of Sam's words. His insinuation that my mother didn't cut her own hair. His larger implication that somebody else did. Somebody who wasn't my mom's hair stylist. Someone who could've been responsible for her death.
Suddenly, I'm shaking all over, from my knees to my hands to my teeth, and I'm not sure when I'll ever stop.