“Before you apologize, you might want to consider your wording.”
He stood up. “I’ve got the five piles here worked out, anyhow. That’s two hours. Do you need me anymore today?”
“No, but if you have time tomorrow . . .”
“I’ll be here after school,” he promised.
He was turning to leave when he walked smack into Jordan. She was panting, and he reached out as if to hold her up by her arms. “What’s the matter?”
She hopped backward to avoid his touching her. “Do you have a car?”
The question sent a tremor of frustration through him. “No!”
“Shit!” Jordan looked at Grace, her eyes pleading. “Can you help me?
Please?
My friend is having an emergency! She’s really sick. I think she needs to go to the hospital.”
“Shouldn’t you call an ambulance?” Grace asked.
“She says she can’t afford an ambulance!” Jordan snapped. “I’m really worried about her. If I had the money for a cab, I’d get one and pick her up, but I don’t.”
“I have money!” Crawford said.
Jordan’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
Before Crawford could offer up all his hard-earned savings, the savings he had just been telling Lily he was loathe to part with for anything other than a car, Grace intervened. “I’ll take you,” she said, grabbing her purse off the desk. “It will be faster than a cab.”
Jordan blinked at her. “Seriously?”
“Sure, come on.”
Jordan turned, swinging her snaggle of recently dyed peach-and-black striped hair over her shoulder.
“Hey!” Crawford said. “You want me to go with you?”
“No, that’s probably not necessary,” Grace told him. Then she remembered her dad. “But if you could stick around here for a little bit . . . ?”
“C’mon!” Jordan cried as she clattered down the stairs. “This is life and death!”
Crawford’s disappointment was palpable, but he shrugged and answered, “Sure. I didn’t have anything else to do.” Then he called out, “I hope your friend’s okay, Jordan!”
Jordan was already out the front door.
Poor Lily,
Grace thought.
She’ll never get that apology now.
26
E
VEN
H
EMORRHOIDS
H
AVE
T
HEIR
U
SES
J
ordan sat erect in the passenger seat, hands flat on the dashboard in front of her as if she could push the car forward from within. She was practically vibrating in panic.
“I’m really worried. She’s not even answering her phone anymore.”
“We’ll get there soon,” Grace told her in an even voice. “It’s not that far.”
Jordan wished she could have found anyone else to help her. Grace seemed to be making a big show of being calm. Or maybe she
was
calm, which was even more irritating. “I know what you’re thinking,” Jordan told her. “You’re thinking that Heather’s just some sort of freak. Not worth the trouble. Because of that other time.”
“That’s not what I was thinking. I’m anxious for her. That’s why I’m doing this.”
A stiff moment of silence followed.
“She’s not tripping, either, if that’s what you suspect,” Jordan said. “Just because she stole a couple of egg rolls doesn’t mean she’s a junkie.”
“I never said—”
“She might have something really wrong with her, like a disease, or food poisoning—people die of that, right?”
The light turned green and Grace accelerated again, but not as fast as Jordan would have liked. She sighed impatiently.
“She’s not going to die,” Grace said.
Jordan snapped her gaze toward that composed profile. “How do you know? I was talking to her. She sounded
really bad.
It’s not like people never die!”
“Right, but—”
“People
I
know die,” Jordan said. “Maybe you’ve heard—I’m a curse.”
Grace frowned but didn’t say anything for a second. “I hadn’t heard that, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I had. It’s nonsense.”
“Oh, sure. When you’re cozying up to Dominic and Lily and Dad, they never mention me.”
“Of course they mention you, but no one’s said you were a curse. Not to me.”
“Well, I am, okay?” Jordan swallowed past a lump of fear in her throat. “I might even be a murderer, which is what Lily calls me. If it hadn’t been for me, my mom and Nina would still be alive. You knew
that,
didn’t you?”
“I’ve never heard anyone say you were responsible.”
“You know why Mom and Nina were driving down that road in the first place? To retrieve me, the family delinquent. Because I’d been arrested.”
“Why?”
“It was all so stupid! My family was at this dumb Hill Country lake house my mom had rented for spring break. It was so boring there. But I’d met a few kids in town, and we were driving around one afternoon and there was this dairy farm in the middle of nowhere. On both sides of the gate to this farm there were these wood cutout cows—cutesy cows, like for an advertisement. So these guys I was with decided it would be hilarious if we moved the cows to make it look like they were humping. Which is what we did—and it wasn’t easy.
“But then, just as we were finishing, the owner drove up and the guys jumped in their car and just left me there. And the farmer called the police, who came and picked me up. They caught the other guys, too, and eventually we all ended up waiting at the sheriff’s office ten miles away. That’s where I called Mom from . . .”
She drew in a ragged breath. “And I was still there later when they came and told me what had happened—that Mom and Nina had been killed. Just a mile or so away from the stupid humping cows. That’s what they probably saw before they died. Maybe that’s even what Nina was thinking about while she bled to death waiting for the ambulance to show up.”
Grace didn’t say anything.
“They told us she probably died right before the ambulance arrived.” Jordan’s voice cracked, and she stopped to swallow. “But it didn’t get there for
twenty minutes.
She was in that car with our mom for twenty minutes, and Mom was—”
Grace interrupted. “You didn’t murder anybody.”
Jordan pushed back against her seat and squeezed her eyes shut. What was the matter with her? Why was she spilling her guts to Grace? She hadn’t even told this much to the therapist.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Grace said. “You weren’t even there.”
Jordan scowled at her and began punching numbers on her cell phone again. “You so don’t get it.”
“It was an accident,” Grace said. “You weren’t driving the car that hit them.”
“I might as well have been.”
She angled away from Grace and watched the city speed by as they drove along I-35’s access road. Heather still wasn’t answering her phone, and Jordan almost missed the turnoff coming up.
“Turn here!” she yelled, pointing so late at the street that Grace almost had to do a U-turn to make it. “It’s this little apartment complex up on the right.”
As soon as Grace pulled her clunky old Subaru into the parking lot, Jordan jumped out of the car, ran to Heather’s door, and knocked sharply. She tried the doorknob, but it didn’t turn, so she pounded some more on the door itself. “Heather!”
After a minute of this, the muffled sounds of someone stirring inside came closer, and Heather finally unlocked and opened the door. Her skin was a pale green, and sweaty. It looked like her legs could barely hold her up.
“Oh, God,” Jordan said, suddenly frozen. Now that she was here, she didn’t know what to do.
Grace stepped past her. “Heather, I’m Grace. We’re going to take you to a doctor.”
“I’ll be fine . . .” Heather coughed and wobbled and let out a groan of pain.
Grace surged forward and caught her as she started to fall. “We’ll get you to the ER.”
“I might as well die,” Heather said, bursting into tears. “I’ll die on my couch, next to Buns. Poor Buns!”
Grace shot Jordan a questioning glance over Heather’s drooping head.
Rabbit
, Jordan mouthed back.
Heather’s moaning about Buns seemed especially delirious because for weeks she had been whining about how she couldn’t afford to take care of the rabbit and needed to get rid of him.
“You need to get well to take care of Buns,” Grace said in a kindergarten teacher voice. “We’ll take you to the emergency room, but first we need to find your purse.”
Heather lifted a limp arm to a chair where her huge canvas bag had been thrown, its contents spilling all over the seat cushion.
Grace scooped it up and directed them to turn back toward the door.
They reached the hospital faster than Jordan would have expected, and when they got to the ER with Heather—who, as if on cue, puked as they stumbled through the automatic doors—a nurse came to whisk her away. Grace and Jordan stayed back to try to give Reception all the information they could. Just as they were finishing up the paperwork, a doctor came out and addressed Grace. “Mrs. Levenger needs an emergency appendectomy.”
Jordan and Grace moved to surgery’s waiting room. Jordan tried to act as calm as Grace looked, but inside she was a quivering wreck.
Heather can’t die.
That would be too awful. Heather was the only friend she had. She treated her like an adult—she’d even started asking Jordan to go out to nightclubs sometimes. Just last Saturday Jordan had snuck out after midnight to go with Heather to see a band. Heather had a crush on the lead singer of a group called Swingin’ Love Carcass. It hadn’t been much of a band, but it was fun to go out like a real person. She was seventeen now, after all.
And Heather was the one who had seen a notice for a summer art program for high school students, at a college in San Francisco. Jordan was going to apply, and Heather had promised to write her a letter of recommendation. Jordan didn’t want to spend another dreary summer in Texas. This winter had been dreary enough. Christmas had been a joke. They’d gone out for Indian food and exchanged perfunctory gifts almost as if they were embarrassed to be acknowledging the holiday.
About the only thing grimmer than Christmas had been her birthday, an occasion her dad had been adamant about marking even though Jordan would have just as soon skipped it. He’d acted almost manically determined to be nice to her that day—almost as if someone had instructed him to. He’d even brought home a cake from a bakery and insisted on singing “Happy Birthday” to her. Everyone had gone along, a little dazed, but during the song Lily had burst into tears and ended up running from the room, and her father had sunk into his chair, looking defeated. Jordan hadn’t been able to breathe, so she’d had to blow out each of her seventeen candles individually. The first time she’d ever blown out birthday candles all alone. Even Dominic, who usually could inhale several pieces of cake before any presents were opened, sat hunched over his plate as if the fluffy coconut cake were made of mud.
Jordan had gone to bed that night thinking of her mom, who used to make such a fuss over birthdays. What would she have thought about their sad attempt at a celebration? And of course, it was impossible to avoid thinking about Nina, her partner in birthdays for as long as she’d existed. How was she supposed to spend the rest of her life getting older, passing milestones, while Nina remained stalled at sixteen forever? Every birthday of her life would be a reminder of that other life that had been cut short. All that potential, snuffed out.
All her fault.
The surgery seemed to be taking forever. Jordan got sick of brooding, worrying, and pretending to read
People
magazine. She’d probably flicked past the same article on Angelina Jolie fifteen times already.
“It’s really good that you panicked like you did,” Grace said, looking over at her. “You were right to.”
Jordan felt a moment of satisfaction—finally, she’d done something right!
Then her lips curled down and she turned to Grace. “She was dying. Any idiot could tell that.”
Grace leaned back and folded her arms. “That apartment really smells. Maybe we should clean it.”
“It’s pointless. I’ve cleaned it before and within days it just goes back to the way it was. I should probably take care of Buns, though. Would you mind swinging by . . . once we figure out how the surgery goes?”
“No, of course not.”
After another hour, the surgeon came out and told them that Heather’s surgery had gone well, she was in recovery, and they could visit her that evening.
Back at Heather’s apartment, Grace picked her way across the floor to the kitchen while Jordan went back to find Buns. The poor animal was hovering in the corner, thumping his back foot on the floor of his filthy cage, which was out of food and almost out of water. She unhooked the plastic water bottle from the bracket that held it to the cage bars and went to the kitchen.
“I’m taking the rabbit with me,” Jordan announced as she leaned around the open cabinet door to reach the sink.
Grace gave no indication of having heard her. “Where are the garbage bags?”
“There are none. Heather doesn’t believe in them.”
She straightened. “How can you not believe in garbage bags?”
“They’re not eco-friendly, because they’re made from petroleum or something.”
Grace’s mouth twisted. “Does she have paper bags?”
“Nobody’s had paper bags since, like, 1940.”
“But—” Grace looked around, seeming almost more hysterical over the lack of garbage bags than she had when they’d been driving Heather to the hospital.
“You don’t have to clean,” Jordan told her again. “She wouldn’t want you to.”
“Everybody feels better in a clean apartment.”
“Not Heather. If you’ll just help me load up the rabbit cage, we can blow.”
“Jordan—”
“What?”
Jordan shouted back. “I didn’t ask you here so you could start doing your Hazel routine. I just came
to get the rabbit.
I told you that, remember?”
Grace lifted her arms and then let them flop back at her sides, a gesture that struck Jordan as being
really
irritating.
“What is it with you?” Jordan asked.
Grace rounded on her in surprise. “With
me?”
“It’s not like I can’t see what’s going on, you know.”
“Oh—I can’t wait to hear this,” Grace said. “Tell me. What’s going on?”
“You’re just trying to suck up, which is probably why you volunteered to help in the first place. Now you can go back and tell my dad that you really saved the day, and he’ll be
so grateful
.”
Grace just stood there with her hands in fists at her sides, her mouth working open and shut like a guppy’s at feeding time. “
You
asked for my help—for the second time. Against my better judgment, I haven’t said a word about the Chinese restaurant. I’ve barely spoken to your dad since your little Thanksgiving tantrum. So if you don’t trust me now, that’s
your
problem.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jordan said, turning to go get Buns.