Between Now and Goodbye (6 page)

'There's an ambulance here.' My dad says vaguely, 'Is Julie hurt?' His eyes flick to me, finally some concern.

'When I called 911 I wasn't sure what had happened, I didn't know if anyone had been hurt so I got an ambulance.'

'You did the right thing.' My dad nods to him appreciatively. 'I'll have them check Julie over, just in case and if they give her the all clear...'

'I'll take her home as soon as she's given the all clear, no problem sir.'

'Have you got any idea what happened here?' He asks.

'I think you should probably hear that from Julie, just...she's really upset and she didn't mean for this to happen.' Even now, even after I've messed up so badly, Charles is still trying to protect me.

'Twenty one years I've been in this office.' My dad says quietly, 'I started out straight out of college and wound up owning the company.' My dad says quietly. He keeps talking to Charles but I'm led away by the paramedics and I can only watch from afar. I watch as my dad talks to Charles, puts a comforting hand on his shoulder, and even gives him a small smile. It's tired and sad, but it's still a smile, and that is when it hits me. If I'm dating Charles, my parents will always think I have a stabilizing influence in my life, and they'll relax the rules. They may even let me out of the house if I'm with him. That's when I decide, I'm not going to break up with him, because for now at least, I need him.

I'm silent as Charles drives me home. He tries to talk to me, reassure me. I just refuse to talk to him, because I'm mad at him, but I can't let him know that if I want to keep him as my boyfriend. Still, he didn't have to tell my father that there had been a fire. The fire department would have contacted him, or the police or whoever. Instead, he shows up and immediately gets my father to come down, while I'm still there.

I knew I should have run when my friends did. They were the smart ones, because they're all safely at him, tucked up in bed or curled up in front of the TV. While I'm driving home to face my mom, who will be asking me a barrage of questions trying to understand what happened, and then my dad, who will be angry and doll out a punishment.

We pull up outside my house and I can see the lights on downstairs. Great, my mom really has waited for me to get home. I had hoped she'd be too tired and decide to go back to bed. I should have known better.

'It'll be ok Julie.' Charles takes my hand and I don't pull away even though I want to. I need him to be on my side, because then he might convince my parents to go easy.

'Will it?' I ask looking over at him. 'It doesn't feel that way.'

'I'll stop by in the morning to see how you are, ok?' He looks so concerned and yet still I almost say no, but I manage to hold my tongue.

'Sure.' I smile at him, lean over and give him a quick kiss. 'Thanks for coming to get me.'

'No problem.' He squeezes my hand, 'I'll see you tomorrow.'

'Yeah.' I nod and get out of the car. He, as usual, waits until I'm inside the house before he pulls away.

I want to race up the stairs and lock myself in my room before I have to face anyone, but I can tell from the low humming of voices coming from the TV, that my mom is in the lounge, and I have to go directly past the lounge to reach the stairs. She'll see me and call me and if I don't respond, I'll end up in even more trouble.

I'm not sure what more trouble it's even possible to get myself into, but I'm not willing to risk finding out. So I steel myself and step into the lounge, sitting down on one of the large leather armchairs.

'Are you ok?' My mom looks me over, head to toe, checking for injuries, 'Your father said there'd been a fire and you were there.'

'I'm fine mom, I got out of the building without getting burnt. The paramedics checked me over and gave me the all clear.' I suddenly feel tired. All the adrenaline that had coursed through me before, has slipped away and left me wanting to curl up in bed and sleep for the next three or four days.

'What happened?' My mom sits down across the room from me.

'Can we just wait until dad gets in? I'd really rather only go over this once.'

'If you insist..' Mom nods but keeps her gaze on me. 'You realize this is very serious.'

'Yeah mom, I realize.' I sigh and we drift into a silence that I couldn't be more thankful for. We don't talk, we just both focus on the screen which is tuned into a channel showing episodes of
Cheers
, one after another until we switch it off when my dad gets in.

He's angry. I can tell as soon as he enters the house, and that's even before I see him. I can tell because he slams the door behind him, which is something he has never done before. It's one of his biggest pet peeves when people slam doors, and I'm constantly getting into trouble because of it. It's so unheard of that he would slam a door, that my mom physically jumps, and it's then that I think she realizes I have more to do with this fire than she first assumed.

When my dad makes it into the lounge, his face is red, his eyes drawn together and he looks older than he did when I left the garden party earlier. I'm hit again with the thought that I did that to him. I aged him in just one night. This doesn't bode well for me.

'What were you thinking?'

'Daddy, I'm sorry.'

'Sorry doesn't cut it, I want answers. What were you doing in my office at three in the morning? I thought you were asleep in your bedroom.'

'Yeah, well I wasn't,' I fold my arms over my chest, 'it's not my fault you didn't think to check I was in bed before you went to sleep.'

'This isn't the time to be flippant young lady.' He glares at me, properly glares and ok, maybe being defensive wasn't the best call, but the fact of the matter is, they never come into my room to say goodnight.

'Fine,' I lower my head and try to look as chastised as possible, 'I was with some friends...'

'What friends?'

'Some friends from school, just...people.' I shrug. I'm not going to give their names, no way am I going to drop them into this mess. If they appear on the security cameras that's another thing, but I won't be the one who gives up who they are.

'Right, ok so you were with your friends and you ended up in my office. How?'

'We wanted somewhere new to hang out, just a small party, ten people or so. I kind of...I mentioned that I had the access code for your office, and that there was a great view and stuff. So we were just hanging out, we weren't drinking or anything, I don't do that.'

'No, but there was a fire Julie. How did the fire start?' He asks. I think he knows that the fire isn't a coincidence. He knows that we didn't just happen to be there when the fire broke out. Still, I want to fabricate something, but I don't know how much Charles said to him. Why didn't I think quick enough to make something up with Charles, making it seem more like the fire just happened while we were there. I didn't though, so I hurry through what happened and then risk a look up at my father.

There's a vein popping in his neck, which has only ever happened a few times in my memory, and it means that what's coming will be bad. Really bad. It doesn't come right away, though, because my dad is far too logical for that. He needs to properly think through my punishment.

I end up being sent to my room to sleep, after he's yelled at me for half an hour about responsibility, and ill judgement and how disappointed he is in me.

I curl up under the covers and hope like crazy that they won't ground me for longer than three weeks, because so far this summer is panning out to be the worst one ever.

Ten – Libby

I don't want to miss a single word that's said in this class. It's not one of our hands on practical classes, which are my favorite. So instead of having an apron on over my clothes, I'm just in a pair of shorts and a loose shirt.

Today's lecture is on traditional Italian cooking, and it's really fascinating. Which is why I'm trying to take down as many notes as possible, and yet three times in the past ten minutes I've been distracted by my phone buzzing in the pocket of my shorts.

My parents have my schedule, so it won't be them unless it's an emergency, and if it was an emergency they would have called the main office by now. Pippa only ever video calls or texts, so I know it's not going to be her.

My first thought is that it's got to be Julie. When she wants to talk, she sometimes expects people to drop whatever they're doing and talk to her. I'm thinking it's probably her wanting to talk about Charles, which I of course want to talk to her about. I called her first thing before my classes, but her phone was off, which probably means she let it run out of charge again.

She must have charged it back up now, seen the missed call and decided to return that call, even though I haven't been answering. Sometimes she doesn't take no for an answer, or silence for an answer in this case. She really can be astonishingly persistent when she wants to be. Which is made clear by the buzzing which has started in my pocket again.

I let out a small, hopefully unheard, sigh, and slip the phone out of my pocket. If I can just get a quick message to her, let her know I'll call her just as soon as I'm out of class, then she'll stop calling me. I glance down at the screen. Charles.

I get to my feet, knocking my chair backwards and dropping my notebook onto the floor, which causes a much louder crash than could possibly go unnoticed.

'Elizabeth?' The tutor looks up, he insists on calling everyone by their full first names, even if they usually go by a shortened version of their name. It reminds me of the weeks I spent getting Julie to accept calling me Libby when I first met her. 'Is something the matter?'

'I'm sorry...I have to step out, it's an emergency.' I say, because Charles is not the kind of person to call this often when something isn't wrong. I've already answered the call and
started walking out before my tutor can say anything else.

'What happened? What's wrong? Is it your mom?' Panic is gripping my heart. Please don't let it be Mrs Parsons. Please.

'She's fine, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called so much, you must have worried. Sorry.' He breathes out, and I do too, 'Nobody is hurt, but... something has happened and I need your help.'

'Yeah of course. Anything.'

'And...you were probably in class.' I hear the apology in his voice before he speaks it out loud, which I know is coming, 'I'm sorry, I can call back later, or you call me when you're free.'

'I'm free now. I've left my class.'

'Are you sure?'

'I'm sure Char, what's wrong?'

'It's Julie.' He replies. My heart stops. She did it, she actually broke up with him and now he's heartbroken. How could she do that to him? Just because she's bored and wants to shake things up a little.

'Char I...'

'It's kind of a long story, when is your next class?' He asks.

'I have time, whatever you need.' I reply walking towards my dorm. He launches into a story far different from the one I'd been expecting. A story about a fire, one that Julie caused.

'Libs, did Julie ever tell you about what happened the year before you moved here? About being in the hospital?'

'No.' I say, sitting on my bed and, hugging a pillow to my chest.

'She got into trouble because she decided to take her dad's car out for a drive, and obviously she wasn't old enough to even have her learners permit, let alone a full license. But she was bored and her friends dared her, so she takes his car out and ends up crashing it. Nobody was hurt, but she managed to put quite a large dent into her dads car. So anyway, her parents grounded her for the entire summer, and after just a week of it, she got frustrated with being home all the time.' He says, sounding like he's struggling with this, 'She tried sneaking out, but they always figured it out. So after they caught her sneaking out for the third time, they locked her windows and hired a babysitter for her. She really didn't like that, so she locked herself into her bedroom and refused to come out for anything. She didn't really need to since she had her own bathroom attached to her room.'

'Ok.' I say, I don't like the sound of where this is going.

'Long story short, she staged a sort of hunger strike, and even when they knocked her door down, she refused to eat anything. Even when they lifted the punishment, because...I don't know, she wanted to teach them a lesson or something. She ended up in the hospital. Basically what I'm saying is that her parents are not happy with the fire, as you can imagine, and they've decided that she's gone too far this time. When school starts back up, they're sending her to a boarding school in Colorado.'

'Oh my goodness.'

'Yeah.' He sighs, 'So her obvious, or at least obvious to her, response to this was to refuse to eat. She won't come out of her room, she won't talk to anyone, and her parents say they won't be manipulated by her into changing their plans. Even if it means having to take her to the hospital and get her hooked up to feeding pumps. The thing is though...I'm really scared that she's going to hurt herself, she's done it before with this not eating thing, and I don't want her to do it again. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.'