Part 5 (2/2)

”Val.” Giggles rose like champagne bubbles in my throat. ”Those guys weren't actual meteorologists. You know that, right?”

She ignored me. ”We should try to find him. Make sure he doesn't talk. Then we can go get the rest of them. Kevin, and Mark, and...”

”We?” I repeated. ”Oh, no. You're on your own, sister. This isn't my problem.”

She looked incredulous. Then, hurt... hurt and very young, in her high heels and red dress. ”You're not going to help me?”

I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and spoke to her slowly, p.r.o.nouncing each word carefully so there'd be no mistaking my meaning, remembering that day in the cafeteria, Val at one end of the room surrounded by her friends and me, alone, at the other. ”Perhaps you don't remember,” I began, ”but the last time I tried to help you, it didn't turn out very well for me.”

She bit her lip, looking abashed. ”I said I was sorry.”

”Yeah, well, you know what? It's a little too late for you to be...” I raised my hands in the frigid night air and hooked my fingers into quotation marks. ”'Sorry.' Do you have any idea what my senior year was like?” I asked, remembering the whispers that followed me everywhere I went: Fat b.i.t.c.h. Fat wh.o.r.e. Fat narc. Always fat something, as if fat was really the worst thing they could say about me, about any girl.

”Do you have any idea what my life was like?” Valerie shot back.

”Actually, I do,” I said. ”I was there, remember? I'm sure it was absolute h.e.l.l, having to decide which guy to go to prom with.”

”You have no idea.”

”No, I don't. I'm sure I couldn't possibly imagine what it's like to be tall, and blond, and gorgeous, and to throw your best friend under the bus...”

”I hated you,” Valerie said. Her voice was flat and toneless.

I stared at her. ”Excuse me?”

”I hated you because you had everything.” She turned away, aiming her keys at the Jaguar. There was a click as the locks popped open. ”Come on. Get in. I'll take you home.”

”Wait. I had everything? What are you talking about?”

She turned to face me, heels dug into the gravel, hands on her hips. ”You had a mom. You had a dad. You had a brother. You had f.u.c.king food in your refrigerator, which, in case you never noticed, was something I did not have, because my mother never ate anything but Tab and f.u.c.king Wheat Thins. You had clean clothes. You had someone to sign your field-trip permission slips and give you five bucks so you could buy lunch. You had someone to show up at parent-teacher conferences. You never had to wake your mother up after she'd pa.s.sed out on the couch with a lit cigarette. You had two parents who loved you...” Her voice caught. ”You had everything.” She turned away and jerked open the pa.s.senger-side door. ”Get in.”

”Valerie.” I felt breathless, like I'd been hit in the stomach. What was she talking about? Her mother had been beautiful and fun, lively and full of adventure. Sure, she was a little scattered, but loving and good-hearted. At least that's what I'd always thought. Had I been that wrong?

”I wanted to belong somewhere,” Val continued.

I stared at her, astonished. ”How did selling me out help you belong?”

She lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug, then dropped her face again. I stood in the parking lot, the night air frigid against my cheeks, not knowing what to say. Of all the times I'd imagined this scene, all the ways I'd thought about it playing out, feeling sorry for Valerie had never been a possibility. I was the victim, she was the villain; I was the ugly duckling, she was the swan. She'd escaped Pleasant Ridge, and I was stuck here, tethered to my brother, tied down by fear. In all my years of fuming and resentful imagining, all the years I'd carried my grudge like a pocketbook I was afraid to set down even for an instant, I'd never considered that there might be a different way of looking at the situation, another truth.

I took the chill of the night air into my lungs and breathed out slowly. ”If Dan's not here, where do you think he went?”

Val shrugged.

”We should try to find him.” I could do that at least, I told myself. I owed her that much for all the years she'd been my friend.

”Why?”

”Because...” I had the sense of somehow having slipped out of my regular life where logic and the normal rules applied and into some other world, a place where you could hit people with your car and escape with impunity, where you could hurt the people who'd hurt you without suffering any consequences... where they'd just disappear, maybe back to the real world, where the rules did apply. Everything was upside-down and backward. ”Because he could be hurt.”

She turned slowly, looking, now, entirely grown-up, like a version of her mother, who could slide out of any tight spot with a pretty smile and a little judicious flirting. ”Not our problem.”

”But if you're the one who hit him...”

She rocked back and forth on her heels. ”What if,” said Val, ”tonight is kind of a... kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

I looked at her, wondering if she had any idea how close what she'd said was to what I'd been thinking.

”What if you could do anything you wanted?” she asked. ”Get back at those boys? Get revenge?”

No, I thought. It doesn't work that way. There's no such thing as something for nothing; the bill always comes due. But then I thought about my life. I'd lost my mother and my father and my brother. I'd lost my best friend and my boyfriend. Worse than all that, I had lost my dreams of the life I'd imagined for myself... and now, if that stiffness in my belly meant what I thought it did, I was going to lose my life, too, probably quickly, and there'd be nothing left to show for the thirty-three years I'd spent on this earth except for a handful of greeting cards that sold in drugstores for a dollar ninety-nine, plus three mugs and a spoon rest, and a brother who didn't always remember that we were related and that I wasn't thirteen. I had nothing but Val... my best friend, who'd come back to me after all this time.

A rust-spotted sedan drove past the entrance of the parking lot. Without speaking, Val and I climbed into the Jaguar, Val behind the wheel, me beside her. The car started up with a purr and spat chunks of gravel in its wake as Val steered for the road.

”Where?” she asked as she accelerated, heading toward the highway, which could lead us back home or... well, anywhere, really. ”Which one should we f.u.c.k up first?”

For some reason, the name that popped into my mind didn't belong to one of my cla.s.smates. Instead, I remembered the guidance counselor, one of the grown-ups, one of the people who should have been keeping me safe. Her name was Carol Demmick, and she'd kept a cruet of vinegar on her desk to sprinkle over the cut-up carrots she snacked on. The kids called her Summer's Eve, or Douche for short (I a.s.sumed she didn't know this). She'd called me into her office once in the spring of senior year, invited me to have a seat, asked me about my plans after graduation, and then asked me, gently, how my senior year had been going. It had been so long since someone at that school had looked at me with kindness, had spoken to me with anything besides indifference or contempt, that I told her. ”Terrible,” I choked. The details came spilling out of my mouth: the kids who tripped me and shoved me, and knocked over my lunch, the graffiti on the walls of every bathroom, how even the teachers seemed to hate me, to treat me like I had some horrible disease that might be catching. The guidance counselor had looked at me for a long minute, her big, buggy gray eyes magnified behind the green plastic frames of gla.s.ses someone had probably told her were ”hip” and ”cool.”

”Addie,” she said in her too-sweet voice, her double chins quivering gently as she studied me. ”I don't mean to be unkind, but maybe, over the summer, you might think about a diet.”

I'd stared at her, stone-faced. Did she think I'd never considered a diet before? That the possibility had never occurred to me? That I was not, in fact, on a diet right now, the same one I'd been on for the past six months and stuck to rigorously until nine o'clock every night? And who was she to talk to me about my weight? She was a fattie, too! ”You know what they say,” she continued, ”you never get a second chance to make a first impression! And inside of every fat person there's a thin person dying to get out!”

I bent down and s.n.a.t.c.hed my backpack off the floor. What kind of first impression did she think she was making, with her calendar of kittens thumbtacked to the wall (Hang in there! read the legend beneath the little white kitty clinging to a branch) and her dyed-blond Mamie Eisenhower bob that had remained unchanged in all the years she'd been at Pleasant Ridge High? ”I've got math,” I said.

Ms. Demmick's plump face softened. ”Addie. I can see I've hurt your feelings. That wasn't my intention. I only...”

... wanted to help, I filled in as I walked into the crowded hall and let her door slam shut behind me. Sure. They all just wanted to help: the doctor, my mother, those boys who followed me down the halls, oinking-just trying to help! The girls I'd overheard in the bathroom-I mean, she's got to weigh, like, two hundred pounds! That's almost two of me! giggle, giggle-just offering their a.s.sistance! The world was just bursting with Good Samaritans, all of them dying to help out poor fat Addie Downs.

”Addie?” Val said from the driver's seat.

I pulled myself back to the present, to the heated seats of the Jaguar, to my old best friend sitting beside me. ”Who'd Dan come with?” I asked.

”Chip Mason,” she answered.

”First we'll check around the country club. Maybe he's on the side of the road. Then we'll go to Chip's.”

”Can we stop for doughnuts first?” She looked at me, wide-eyed and hopeful.

I bit back another gust of laughter. Vehicular manslaughter, then baked goods. Sure thing! Why not? It sounded like fun, and I hadn't had any of that in a very long time.

TWELVE.

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