A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (10 page)

The following car slammed on its brakes and screeched to a halt a few feet behind me. I looked up, a little dazed, and dragged my bike out of the roadway, into the waves of sharp tall grass. I lay down there—the grass came up as high as my chest, hiding me almost completely. My palms were scratched with blood where they hit the pavement, and blood dripped on the top of my hand too. Experimentally, I prodded my face, and felt something wet and warm against my lip. But I was okay. I would live.

For a while I just lay there and watched my chest rising and falling. My heart was thrumming like a tiny bird, and right down to my toes, my muscles tensed and twitched.

I was okay. I would live.

I told myself that a few more times, and I tried moving my hands and feet just to prove that it was true. But my nerves jangled. I tried to get up and my legs felt swimmy under me.

I could have died. And it was my fault. Half my fault. I wasn’t paying attention. I was being an idiot. Even if some redneck decided it would be hilarious to buzz the bike-riding hippie, most bike-riding hippies would’ve had the presence of mind to get his license plate, and return the insult.

But mostly what was going around my head was just simply, I could have died. Or I could’ve gotten hurt, bad, and I’d have been left hurt and alone and scared and waiting to die.

Like Julia.

Oh.

I rolled over onto my stomach and leaned my head against crossed arms.

When I stopped at a diner, when I stopped at a convenience store, someone would eventually ask me if I was insane, or if my parents were insane, and if I had any idea how dangerous it was and any number of terrible things could happen to me.

I didn’t care. I always said that I didn’t care. And now I felt cold all through, to realize that I didn’t care after all.

I didn’t care because it would be okay if I died.

Of course it wasn’t okay. But the idea that maybe it was scared me out of my mind, worse than getting buzzed and landing bruised and scraped onto a country highway. Like the moment when you realize there are real bullets in the toy gun you’ve been playing with.

It wouldn’t be a decision. It would be a split second of inattention that let my wheel slip into a groove or slam my front brake too hard going downhill, and that would be enough. The tiny part of me that didn’t care if I lived or died might let it happen.

I couldn’t trust my own head anymore.

After a while I managed to get up, get to my bike and check it for bent wheels and flat tires. I swung my leg over the top tube and glanced back at the road behind me, one foot hovering over the right pedal—and I stopped breathing. I seized up; my throat felt dry. By the time I got off and sat in the grass again, I was trembling.

For the rest of that day and that night, I sat there eating PowerBars and stared down my death.

I
was testing out my miniature catapults. I had two, both the length of my forearm, just large enough to heave a Beanie Baby at someone. I aimed one carefully, at a corner of the workshop, and sprang a purple bean creature into the air.

Heather snapped her head up when she heard the sound. “Oooh. Can I try? Is it dangerous?”

I considered this. “Well, I wouldn’t point it at someone’s eye or anything. Go ahead, give it a whirl.”

She snapped up the other weapon, along with a penguin and a shark for ammunition, and skulked off into the corners that were piled high with costumes and props for ancient productions. It was too small a room to have anywhere to hide, but that didn’t stop Heather from flattening herself against the boxes and looking backward and forward like a parody of a spy movie. And then she fired her penguin, just over my head.

“Hey! I
gave
you that one!”

“Then return fire!”

I hesitated. But, well—it was just stuffed animals. Small stuffed animals. That does not even count as violence. So I lobbed a green teddy bear at her, and it bounced off her shoulder.

“I aimed to miss!” Heather protested.

“Too bad!”

And then we were chasing each other around the workshop, not bothering with setting and aiming our weapons, but just throwing the little beanbags at each other, giggling when we could breathe enough to do it. As innocent as two six-year-olds in a water-gun fight. We scrambled over boxes and leaped over bits of props strewn on the floor.

Until my feet tripped over something, and I went down on the concrete, tumbling into the space between two towers of cardboard boxes.

It wasn’t a bad fall. It knocked the wind out of me, and I could feel a little ache in my hip where I’d fallen, but nothing broken, nothing even bruised.

Heather ran up and leaned over me. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.” My hands weren’t even scuffed.

“Are you sure?” She kneeled down and stretched out her hand. I took a deep breath, and not from running around or falling down. She looked tender and worried, and she brushed her hair back behind her ears so that I could see her eyes, and I thought—Give me a minute. Let me stay here and watch you.

I smiled. “I am one hundred percent unhurt.” I took her hand and gathered myself up. And I threw my last leopard at her just to make her laugh.

We didn’t see Oliver until he was already down the stairs and in the middle of the floor, his face ashen.

“We have a problem,” he said.

We both got quiet real fast. We had a problem, sure, we always had problems. But Oliver looked so serious.

“There’s no good way to say this. C’mon, upstairs.”

We sat down beside each other on the ugly paisley couch. It was just the three of us—Jon and Amy had gone back-to-school shopping, and Lissa was off at the fabric store’s Labor Day sale for the last-minute costume bits she was working on.

Ollie played with his cell phone for an anxious moment. “So we got permission a while back from the principal and the vice principal to put on
Ninja Death Squad,
right?”

“That’s what you said.”

“Look—I’m not that much of an idiot. I let the principal read the script before school even let out last year, I let him know that it’s a play with some blood spurting everywhere, and it has ninja and death in the title, and he seemed to get that it was cartoon violence as opposed to the kind of thing that might be really objectionable. I asked way back a few months ago so that we would have time enough to put together a plan B. So guess what happened?”

I could see where this was going. “He got nervous.” “Not him. But all the flyers plastered up everywhere that say
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
? From what he says, half the parents and all of the PTA are calling up outraged. And they threatened to call the superintendent down on us, and the school board, and the TV news, so . . . he went back on his word. We don’t get to use the auditorium.”

Heather swore—with astonishing creativity—and coughed, not quite embarrassed.

“What did they teach you in Catholic school?” I teased.

“That.”

Heather glanced up at Oliver, who was gazing at us with a look that was so familiar.
You two have a private joke and I’m on the outside.
It was strange to be on the inside for once, special and awkward at the same time. “So what’s our next move?”

“What next move?” He slouched back. “We do not have a stage. If we did have a stage, there’s no way two weeks would be enough time to set up for the changes we’d have to make and promote the new location and—everything else that still had to get done in the next two weeks anyway, and that we didn’t even have enough time to do.”

“We’ve got a stage here.”

“And the community theater people have been nice enough to let us rehearse here, in the hours when it’s empty, but they still consider us just a bunch of random high school kids. I talked to them when we were just getting started, and—it was a no. A definite no.”

“Well, then, we’ll figure out something else.” Heather was leaning forward, eyes sharp, her voice rising.

Ollie pressed his fingers against his temples, chestnut hair falling in front of his eyes.

“There’s nothing else left to figure out. We’re . . . we’re not going to make this work. We might as well just give up.”

He’d decided that already, I realized. None of the rest of us were even a part of this decision.

“You put in a hell of a lot of work, and I put in a hell of a lot of work. And Amy and Lissa and Jon and—that guy I don’t even know who always shows up in his ninja costume, and—just like that, it’s over? How the hell can it be over?”

“I know, Heather, I know, so can you shut up about it?”

“And what about Cass? I mean, shouldn’t she have some kind of say in this?”

Suddenly they were both looking at me.

And I didn’t know what to say.

“Not really,” I said. “I’m not one of the drama people.”

“You’re one of
our
people,” Oliver said. “Get used to it.”

I thought I could understand Oliver. I could understand what it felt like to be sick of banging your head against things, sick of knocking at a door that wasn’t going to open, sick of letting your hopes rise and setting yourself up for another heartbreak. I recognized the exhaustion in Ollie’s heart. I’d been there, in Oklahoma. There’s a time for giving up.

But there was Heather, as much of a hopeless overachiever as I was, and angry at her ex-girlfriend for not trying hard enough. Angry at herself for not trying hard enough. I loved her, in that instant, for being completely unwilling to let us not try hard enough.

“It’s too soon to give up,” I said. “Sleep on it, let us take over. See what it looks like tomorrow. I broke one promise to Julia this summer, and I’ll be damned if I break another.”

He threw up a hand. “Do what you want to do.”

I called up Amy, because she never deleted a single e-mail that wasn’t spam, and she had everyone’s numbers and e-mail addresses. She stormed in a half hour later with two bottles of Mountain Dew, stuffed shopping bags, her laptop wedged under her arm, Jon following behind her.

“This is not fair,” she announced, like we didn’t already know that. “As if
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
aren’t full of bloodshed! And besides, none of these PTA people ever came to a school play here, and they wouldn’t have come to this one, and what’s it their business if the front row gets splashed with corn syrup.”

We took turns calling people. Everyone. Anyone who might have even the slightest link to an answer. I called the guy who did Shakespeare in the Park with Julia last year, the tiny Asian woman in charge of the giant puppet protest theater, who wasn’t really happy that we were producing a completely silly and ahistorical play about ninjas. I ended up apologizing to her a lot.

Then Heather lifted up her head, blinking.

“Why are we making the assumption that we need to ask permission?”

“Um, because we don’t own our own theater?”

“Yeah, so we need permission to put on a play. We don’t need permission to put on
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
. As long as we can get permission to put on, I don’t know,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead . . .”

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Zombies,”
Jon volunteered.

“And nobody would have to know.”

“Until the premiere.”

“And what are they going to do, haul us off the stage? Didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission?” Heather put a hand on her hip, daring us to chicken out.

Jon was grinning, just out of a corner of his mouth. “I don’t know. There is no possible way that we are going to keep this a secret. For one thing, Mr. Vaichon is going to be putting on
Our Town
in the fall, and we’re getting started as soon as school starts.”

“People have been keeping better secrets than this from their high schools since before we were born,” Heather insisted. “Mr. Vaichon—drama teacher?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s he like?”

“He gets worked up about people who think Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays, and he doesn’t let anyone get away with slacking, but he’s an okay guy.” Jon shrugged. “He liked Julia a lot.”

“Perfect,” Heather said. “Everybody meet me after school on Tuesday. We’re going to volunteer for
Our Town.
Vaichon covers for us, we convince the freshninjas to volunteer too so no one tells on us, and we take down our flyers and whisper to people that they should show up anyway.”

It wasn’t a complete plan. We were still going to have to wait until Tuesday to see Mr. Vaichon and figure out if we had a chance. But it was hope, and that’s more than we had a few minutes ago.

I clinked my soda bottle against hers, after we were by ourselves again. “Heather?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re kind of a genius.”

She grinned. “Come on. For years I lived with
It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission
and
What they don’t know can’t hurt them
and
It’s only wrong if you get caught
. Being undercover isn’t always wrong. That’s what being a ninja is all about—you’re not just being stealthy because it’s totally sweet, it’s so that you can stay alive. So if our little play needs to go in the closet, bring it on.”

That is when I decided something. Or realized something.

I had an itty-bitty little crush.

I
spent hours lying on the grass, one arm pillowed behind my head and the other shading my eyes from the sun, trying to convince myself to get up. My skin began to crawl with twitchy boredom and scratchy heat. I got up and I paced and I sat down again and ripped tufts of grass out of the ground Jon-style, and drank tiny sips of water as if I was in danger of running out. My phone rang, and I jumped. Oliver on the caller ID, and I kept staring at it, thinking that I wanted somebody to say something kind and encouraging to me, somebody I could complain to. But not him. He wouldn’t understand, and I wouldn’t be helpless in front of Oliver. So I let it ring until it went to voicemail, and after a few minutes I checked the voicemail.