Twice Shy (26 page)

Ani looked down at the painting Devon had ruined. Mike's green eyes stared up at her, blazing with internal light beneath wings of feather and flame. He held a small woman, her arms wrapped around his neck. The woman's face—Ani's face—was ruined, destroyed by Devon's foot.

Mr. Frazer put his hand on her shoulder, his face twisted in grief. "I'm so sorry, Ani. That was a beautiful painting."
That painting was rolled up in my locker.
Ani had brought it in to put in her portfolio, but had yet to show it to Mr. Frazer.

"How...? I never submitted that painting for display."

Mr. Frazer cocked his head. "Miss Daniels brought it to me this afternoon, after you left to change, said you'd forgotten to."
Fey. I'm going to kill her.
"It's the best work I've seen from you, so I swapped out the frame from your impressionist poppies."

Ani knelt down and tore the ruined canvas from the frame. Crumpling it into a ball, she noticed the crowd. Everyone looked at her. Everyone.
Yeah, go ahead and stare.

She looked at Mr. Frazer, but spoke for the room. "He saved my life."
And I love him.
"That's what inspired me."
He's my angel.
"That's all."
And I want him.

"Well," Mr. Frazer said, frowning at the crumpled canvas as he scooped the frame from the floor. "It was impressive. I hope you can recreate it." They both knew that art rarely worked that way.

Ani went to her locker, pulled up on the handle and kicked the bottom to pop it open, and gasped. Strips of canvas and paper tumbled to the hallway floor. Her portfolio. Six years of her best work in tatters. She knelt, picked up the shreds and held them to her chest. Fey had spared nothing.

Ani was halfway to Fey's house when headlights blinded her. A car screeched to a halt ten feet in front of her, and her mom got out. "Ani, get in the car." Her breath fogged.
It must be chilly.

She stopped. "No. I'm going to go talk to Fey."

"No, you're not. Mr. Frazer called, told me what happened. You need to get a hold of yourself."

"I'm fine," Ani said. She started to walk around the car and her mom got in her way.

"No, you're really not. Look at your hand."

Ani held her hand up and looked at it. The palm looked fine. She turned it around and hissed in surprise. White bone flecked with green paint protruded from the ruined skin on her fingers. "What—" Her middle finger bone was cracked, a jagged line from knuckle to knuckle.

"You ruined your locker. Put your fist right through the metal." Ani stared in wonder at the damage she'd done to herself. "You need to get in the car and calm down. I'll make sure Tiffany is disciplined, but you can't confront her yourself. You might kill her."

"And that would be a bad thing how?"

Her mom grabbed her shoulders and shook. "You're not thinking right; you're too angry. Now get in the car. We're going home."

Ani got in the car. When they got home, her mom cleaned her hand, smeared it with regenerative paste, and wrapped it in gauze. She spent twenty minutes reassuring Ani that she had a year to rebuild her portfolio, and that she had plenty of pieces at home and in Mr. Frazer's room that could serve almost as well as what was ruined. Ani spent the next ten hours in the bath, fantasizing about cracking open Fey's skull and feasting on her brains. This time she let the thoughts come.

*  *  *

The next morning she asked her mom to give her a ride to school. The thought of even being on the same bus as Fey made Ani's face burn, but she was calmer than she had been, more resigned than homicidal.
She'd just better stay away from me.

Her mom was going to work anyway. She'd finished transferring their copies to the mysterious off-site location, and besides, it was School Nurse Day. They arrived, and she was escorted straight to the office.

Fey had been suspended—at least five days out of school, with possible expulsion for vandalism. Devon got two days of out-of-school suspension, plus three of in-school. Ani was given two days detention for the locker damage.

When she got to her locker, it had a brand-new door. Jake lurked next to it with a sullen, apologetic look on his face. She lifted the handle and kicked. Nothing happened.
Oh, crap...
She bit her bottom lip and thought, ignoring Jake. Her combination came to her, and she opened the door with her bandaged hand.

"Ani—" Jake began.

"Don't presume you can talk to me," she snapped, slamming her bag into the locker.

"That's not fair."

"Oh, isn't it?" she asked, jerking out her first period supplies. "You mean like 'not talking to me for weeks because Fey told you not to' unfair, or some other kind?"

"I didn't realize—"

"I don't care. I thought you were my friend. You proved otherwise. End of story."

"Ani, please. You know how Fey can get."

Ani sighed and turned to face him. "You know what? I do. I do know how Fey can get. She's a schizophrenic bitch who uses friendship as a weapon." She saw the agreement in his eyes and went for the kill. "And if she ever told me I couldn't be your friend, I'd tell her to get over herself. You just went along. Coward."

He flinched. "I'm really sorry." He sounded it.

"I still don't care." She realized it was true.

She walked away, ignoring the sympathetic look from Mrs. Weller, standing in her doorway. Jake didn't follow.

She walked around the corner and bounced off Mike. She stumbled back and looked up at him, eyes wide. "Oh, Mike, no one was supposed to see that."

He scowled down at her, face flushed. "Yeah. Whatever." He sidestepped and kept walking. She watched him go.

Ani was pulled out of band so that her mom could be appreciated by the administration in front of a tiny and coerced audience. It was just as well—she couldn't play with her hand bandaged anyway. She was the first person in the nurse's office and put on a fake smile.

"Yay, Mom," she deadpanned.

Her mom put a hand to her head. "Oh, great. This again."

"Yeah. Happy School Nurse Day."

She closed her notebook. "I assume the horde is impending?"

"Probably. I was just called down." It amazed Ani that the same people responsible for making every student a slave to bells could never manage to be on time.

"How's your hand?" her mom asked.

Ani flexed it. "Not bad. My middle finger hurts a little."

"It should hurt more." She frowned. "The staff is abuzz about how strong you are. You need to be more careful."

Ani was saved from a reply by the arrival of Mr. Bastian and Superintendent MacIlwaine. They said their hellos, then stood around in awkward silence for a few minutes before three adults Ani recognized but didn't know came in.
School board members?
They presented her mom with a cupcake with a red cross on it and a certificate of appreciation.

Mr. Bastian said, "We want you to know how much we appreciate you, Sarah."

"Oh, go to hell," her mom said. The board members gasped.

"Mom!"

"Miss Romero," growled the superintendent.

Her mom rolled her eyes at Mr. MacIlwaine. "
Doctor
Romero. I don't get paid enough to take false platitudes from that ass." She looked at Mr. Bastian. "You can get out of my office."

Ani tried to melt into the background.

"Sarah," the superintendent tried again. "Apologize to Geoff."

"Not even if you fire me," she said. The room faded into tense silence. Her mom smiled. "You know what? I quit. Life is too short to put up with his crap for one more minute."

"Mom..." Ani said.
I need you here.

"Good," Mr. Bastian said. "It's about time."

"Are you sure you don't want to think about this?" the superintendent asked. "Take the afternoon—"

"No, I'm done." She yanked the lanyard off her neck and dropped her nametag on the floor.

"Your health insurance—"

She barked a harsh laugh. "I can pay COBRA for as long as I have to. Forget two weeks. I'm going home." She picked up her purse and walked out. They stared after her, stunned.

"Can I go back to class now?" Ani asked.

*  *  *

By the time she got home, her mom had cleaned the whole house, and was busy folding laundry.

"Hey, Mom," she said.

"Hi, honey."

No maniacal laughter. That's a good sign.
"So, how are you feeling?"

She dropped the last pair of jeans onto the pile and smiled. "I feel great. Better than I have in two years." Sweaty, and flushed, she looked downright frail.

"Are you sure about this?"

She laughed. "It's too late for second thoughts. Geoff wouldn't take me back for a million dollars, and Jim dodged a bullet on health insurance costs. It doesn't matter. I hate that place."

One more thing you've done for me.
"I know, Mom, but you took that job to protect me."

She stacked the laundry in the basket and picked it up. "You'll be fine, sweetie." She smiled. "I need to get in the shower—I have a date tonight."

Of course you do.

She carried the laundry basket into the bedroom and kicked the door closed.

Ani checked the medicine cabinet after her mom had left with Mr. Brown. There was nothing inside that would explain her behavior.

Chapter 28

The next two weeks were a blur. Her mom stayed home all day doing research and spent every evening out with Mike's dad. Ani tried to recreate her portfolio from the scraps, but her muse had abandoned her. Everything she painted became a nightmare of aggressive smudges, every drawing a study of chaos in black and white. Her bouncy compositions turned angry, spiteful.
Festering Rage in D Minor.

Devon came back to school unapologetic and vindictive, flanked by Rose and Leah. Every comment seemed to be a passive-aggressive attack on Ani, every look a glare, but they never approached, never did anything overt. Mrs. Weller noticed and tried to talk to her about it, but Ani just gave noncommittal replies until she left her alone.

Fey called six times in two weeks. Ani screened her calls, and didn't return her rambling messages, begging forgiveness and pleading intoxication. No apology could atone for what she did. Ani was alone and she needed to accept it.
Water, water, everywhere; nor any drop to drink.

She did her homework, practiced for the spring concert as her fingers healed, succumbed to her mom's increasingly intense research experiments, and read. She started and put down four chick-lit novels before giving up on the genre—it didn't speak to her anymore. Nothing did.

*  *  *

Ani changed her clothes for the spring concert and sat on the couch waiting for her mom to get out of the shower so they could go. She flexed her middle finger to limber it up—the bone might never heal, but the flesh around it was firm and it didn't hurt much. "It should hurt more," her mom had said.

The doorbell rang. She peeked out the window. Mike stood there in his chorus uniform, black pants and a white collared shirt that showed off his muscled figure. In his left hand he held a single red rose, and he shifted his feet as he waited.

Ani blinked, expecting the apparition to disappear. He was still there.
You have to remember he's still a jerk.
The flower was still there. Her ears flooded with static.
You have to breathe.
She forced herself to inhale and exhale and yanked open the door.

"Mike!" she said. She couldn't contain a smile. He held out the rose, which she took and held to her nose. "It's beautiful." She took a deep breath, savoring what little of the delicate aroma she could. There was an unpleasant finish, like the garbage truck had just gone by. She smelled it again, and the unpleasant scent was gone.

He swallowed. "Hey, Ani. I just talked to my dad. For, like, the first time in weeks. It made me realize how much I missed you. I was so angry I couldn't think straight, and I took it out on you. I thought you knew and hid it from me, and I should have talked to you."
I can forgive those eyes anything.

"I—" A figure tackled Mike from the side, barreling him off the stoop and into the yard. Ani shrieked as they rolled across the grass, the fetid, rotten stench almost overpowering. The shadowy figure moaned, and it sounded like "mine." Mike's scream cut off in a sickening gargle.

Dylan bared his teeth on top of Mike, his drooping face half-covered with moss. He held the larger boy down, strangling with both hands. Mike beat and raked at Dylan's face, and a gob of bloody flesh sloughed off into the grass, exposing white skull beneath.

Ani lurched forward as Dylan opened his mouth wide and leaned in toward Mike's face. She grabbed his hair, matted and stringy, forcing his head back. Her grip started to slip, so she tangled the other hand in the greasy mess and pulled. Dylan was strong—so strong—but she was strong, too, and had better leverage.

Dylan's back arched. He moaned in despair as she pried him away from his meal, his drool spattering Mike's chest. "Mine." Ani pulled harder, bending his whole body backward. His scalp tore free from his skull. Ani pinwheeled and fell flat on her back.

A shotgun fired. Ears ringing, Ani looked up. Dylan's headless corpse collapsed onto Mike, who gasped for air on the ground. Ani's mom stepped over him, shotgun in her right hand, meat cleaver in the left. "Did he bite you?"

"Um..." he said. He worked his mouth and nothing came out.

She dropped the shotgun and backhanded him. "
Did he bite you?
" she yelled.

Mike held up his right hand. His index finger bore teeth marks, ragged and bloody. Her mom stepped on his wrist and brought the cleaver down, she had a deadly aim. There was a wet sound, and Mike screamed. "Is that the only place?"

She pulled the cleaver up, spattering blood across the lawn. "
Is it?
"

"Yes," he screamed. "Yes, that's it."

Ani scrambled on all fours to his side. Mike was spotted with blood and drool, each drop a death sentence if ingested, or if it seeped into a cut. Hot blood spurted from where his index finger used to be.