100 Days of Cake (31 page)

Why does V know this?

Who else knows this?

Gram?

My dad's parents in Missouri, who send us five-dollar checks for Christmas and our birthdays and see us once every few years if they happen to be in Florida?

Any of the friends that my parents had in Miami?

Who else?

“Molly, let me ex . . . ,” Mom is saying, but she might as well be back in that Charlie Brown world where adult talk is nothing but sad trombone.

Without even acknowledging her, I step over the mess of spilled dry ingredients and charge back up the stairs to my bedroom. I pick up my phone and scroll through the call log to the most recent outgoing call.

Dr. B. picks up on the first ring. “Molly, I'm so glad you call—”

“Did you know about my father?” I demand. “Is that why you always wanted me to talk about him?”

“Know what? About you making up those stories?”

“Not that.” I bat his response away as if he were in the room with me. “When my mom first talked to you last year, did she tell you that my dad killed himself?”

“Oh, wow.” Across the line, Dr. B. inhales a deep breath like he's just a regular Joe Blow who doesn't know any more about human behavior business than the rest of us. “No, Molly, I had no idea.”

“She didn't say anything about it at all?”

“No. I mean, I really wish she had. That could have been helpful in our treatment.”

“It could have been helpful for ME.” My voice cracks at the end, and I think I might cry . . . AGAIN, because that's what I do. Maybe because that's what my dad did—cry and slam into trees at ninety miles an hour on bright sunny days.

“Molly—”

“Might have been nice to know that I'm just made this way and no amount of stress balls or headshrinking can help that.”

“It doesn't work that way,” he says. “You're still your own person.” He sounds like Dr. B. again, and I remember
that before I invited him to the FishTopia event, before I kissed him, before I jammed my knee into his balls, I liked him because he seemed like a nice guy who genuinely wanted to help.

“Can we set up an appointment?” I ask. “Please? Maybe something today or our old time?”

“Molly, I want to put you in touch with a colleague. She's a psychiatrist, so she could help you with your meds, too. I think she'd be a great—”

“I don't want another shrink.” I hate myself for whining, but how could he even think about leaving me NOW?

“I am so, so very sorry about what happened.” He sighs the saddest of all sad sighs, and I can picture him rubbing his eyebrows. “You didn't do anything wrong—so don't blame yourself; it was my fault—but I can't be your therapist anymore.”

“You were drunk. Just don't drink at our appointments, and we'll be fine.” Even if he was a scary gropey jerk, I still
need
him.

“Molly, I should have set you up with a different therapist a long time before that night.” A sigh that is somehow even sadder than the last one. “It's the first thing they tell you about in school—warning signs that you're developing feelings for a patient or she's developing them for you. They were all there, but I just kept thinking,
She's only seventeen. Don't worry about it
.”

There it is again, this limbo where I'm straddling two worlds and not fitting into either.

“You're dealing with some really big issues, especially with this new information about your father,” he continues. “Please don't let what happened between us prevent you from getting treatment. Can I at least give you Dr. Frankel's contact info?”

He lists some information that I tune out. I'm back to floating above myself, watching everything from a nice place somewhere else.

T
hat is seriously effed up,” Elle says when I tell her about my dad's non-accident accident.

We're on the model-home deck in my backyard, on the grass, Elle's brother is running in dizzying NASCAR ovals. The cake we're eating is from a few days ago. I guess Mom didn't really feel like finishing the one yesterday after V dropped the truth bomb and the corresponding flour bomb.

Suddenly Elle stops chewing, mid-forkful, and pushes her plate aside. “Oh God, we're eating a dead person's dessert.”

For a few seconds I contemplate this. “No, it's not actually like that at all.”

“It's still creepy, though,” Elle says, but takes another bite; even I have to admit that Mom's getting really good at this. “It's like cake equals death, or maybe it's that the lack
of cake is death. The whole thing feels like an English question about symbolism.”

It
is
messed up. But the cake thing doesn't weird me out as much as it probably should. It just makes me sad that Mom was so desperate and clueless that the best way she could come up with to help me was to start some AP English bake-a-thon.

My memories of Dad's funeral are the vaguest of vague. Casseroles and trays of cookies that I kept thinking were for my birthday, stacked on the kitchen table. Hundreds of hands patting my head and saying gentle things; no one wanting to play My Little Pony with me. But the weird thing is, as little as I remember, I do have pretty distinct memories of blowing out candles while sitting on Mom's lap with Gram there. I guess my unconscious makes things up even when I'm not just saying stuff because it's easier or I want my shrink to like me.

“Did your mom explain why she told V and not you?” Elle asks.

The truth is, I really didn't give Mom much of an opportunity to explain anything. She came up to my room a few times and asked to talk, but I couldn't bring myself to look at her. She'd taken away Pluto.

It's bizzare, but I can't articulate why I'm mad at Mom. There's probably never really a great time to tell your kids, “Oh yeah, your dad actually meant to take a header into that tree—he couldn't be bothered to hit the brakes.”

“No,” I say. “I guess she was only trying to look out for us.”

Elle scrunches her face when I say this. “You should tell her that.” Elle sighs. “Having a mother who looks out for you actually sounds kind of great.”

On cue Jimmy starts some new endeavor where he picks up speed and hurls himself in a feetfirst slide into the white picket fence. (It
is
the model home. Of course there's a white picket fence.)

“At the very least you should hear what she has to say,” Elle says, completely ignoring him. She asks if I've decided to do anything about Dr. B., and I tell her that I'm still thinking about it.

“Molly, what's there to think about? The guy is a jerk and might be danger—”

Before she can finish, Mom bursts through the door to the deck, even though it's barely eleven a.m. and she usually works until at least six. The panicky depression/Gram look is splashed across her face.

“Is V with you?” she demands, eyes flittering from me to Elle to Jimmy.

“No,” I say, even though that's obvious.

“Oh God.” Her hand rises to her throat, and she fiddles with this little gold scissors necklace V and I got her for Mother's Day. “Have you seen her at all today?”

Even when I'm
trying
to avoid my sister, I usually bump into her in the hall or in the Jack-and-Jill bathroom between
our bedrooms, but thinking back through the morning, I come up completely blank.

“What's wrong, Mrs. Byrne?” Elle asks.

“Jaclyn Noble called. Apparently V didn't come in this morning, and no one at the store can get in touch with her.”

“She's got to be home,” I offer. “Her phone's been ringing nonstop all morning, and you know she'd never leave the house without it.”

Mom explains she thought that too, that she went in to talk to V last night, saw her phone on her nightstand, and figured she was in the bathroom.

“She was so mad, I just thought that I'd give her a little time.” Mom is clutching the hell out of the necklace. “Then when she was gone this morning, I figured she had already left for the store. But I don't think she's here.”

From the yard Jimmy shouts that V isn't in the house. “I always check to see if Veronica my love is home when we come over. The lump on her bed was just a pile of clothes.”

“Oh God,” Mom says. “Do you think she's been gone all night?”

“I'm sure she's fine,” Elle says, eyes flicking toward me.

“Jaclyn said none of the girls had any idea where she might be.” Mom is winding up. “Should we call the police?”

“No, no. She's probably just at her boyfriend's or something,” I say.

Mom's a few words away from tears. “I didn't even know she had a boyfriend.”

Welcome to the How Can You Not Know That about Veronica Byrne club. “We're friendly with him, and he lives pretty close by. Maybe Elle can take me over there and we can check?”

Elle nods and grabs her keys.

“Should I come too?” Mom asks, but as upset as she is, even she has to realize how much worse that would potentially make things. Bad enough having your sister show up.

“No,” I say. “Why don't you stay here with Jimmy in case she calls the landline or comes back or something? We'll shoot you a text as soon as we find her.”

Elle and I hurry outside and climb into her dad's old Jeep.

“It was off Stanhope Drive, right?” she asks, and I have a weird flash of the only other time we ever went to Chris Partridge's house, the night of his party when I ran into V on my way out and she said I should stay so we could bond or something.

“Yeah.” I nod. “She's got to be there, right? Like, that's where she had to go?”

“I'm sure she's fine,” Elle assures. “She was probably just terrified to face you and your mom after all that.”

We turn down Stanhope, and I recognize Chris's house as the one with the bright blue door. The second Elle puts
the car into park, we spring out, and we're breathing hard by the time Chris's brother Robbie comes to the door in swim trunks and an FSU T-shirt.

“Yo, Chris, some more of your
high school
friends are here,” he calls through the house, and then disappears.

“Ronnie—” Chris jogs to the door, but his face falls when he sees it's the other Byrne girl. “Oh. Hi, Molly. Hi, Elle.”

“Is my sister here?” I ask.

“Um, no.” Chris nervously shifts from foot to foot and jams his hands into the pockets of his khaki shorts. He doesn't sound at all believable.

“I don't even need to talk to her or anything, but my mom has no idea where V is, and she's about to put her picture on a milk carton.”

Seeming even less sure, Chris tells us he doesn't know where she is.

“Can you just let us know if she's all right, then?” Elle says.

“We're all getting kind of worried,” I add, and it's true. If she's not here or at the store, where else could she be? How do I know so little about her these days? “Please.”

“Okay.” Chris sighs and nods and looks extremely relieved. “But I'm only telling you this because I don't know if she
is
all right. Yesterday she called me from the pay phone at the Shell station on Sunflower and asked me to come get her.”

A pay phone?

“She was all upset, and she'd done this really weird white thing with her hair. But when I asked her what the deal was, she just kept saying that she'd screwed up . . . with you.” He points his head toward me.

“She said that?” I ask.

“Yeah, but she didn't want to talk about it, and she was pretty, I don't know, snappy with me. I was supposed to work, but I told her I'd get someone to cover for me at the theater if she wanted to hang out or whatever—she just seemed so messed up. But instead she had me drop her off by the park in old town. She said she wanted to see her grandma.”

“Really?” I ask.

“I felt douchey leaving her there, but she, like, insisted,” he says. “Does your grandma even live there?”

“Down the street from the park, yeah.”

“She was just so weird about the whole thing.” Chris looks completely lost. Next to me Elle makes a sympathetic clicking noise with her tongue. “I tried her cell a bunch of times last night, but she never called back. And we usually talk every night. I reached out to a couple of her friends, but they didn't know anything either.”

“I'm sure she's fine,” Elle says, but she doesn't sound that convinced anymore.

From my phone I try my grandma's landline (Gram might be the only person in the twenty-first century who doesn't have a cell) but get the machine. I have some vague
memories of her volunteering at the library some mornings.

“Maybe V is there and doesn't feel right answering the phone?” Elle suggests. “You know, it's not her house, why deal with someone else's telemarketers?”