Black Tuesday (6 page)

She didn't.

 

“Jayne, phone!” Ellie rattled the doorknob. “What's with the locked door?”

Jayne pried her eyes open and saw it was 6:12. Her room was brighter and warmer. She might've gotten the bigger room, but at least Ellie didn't have to deal with a window that faced west as the afternoon sun hovered on the horizon.

“Who is it?” She wasn't up to talking to Tom. He'd already left three messages with her dad. She hadn't turned on her computer in the last couple of days, but she was sure she'd find a few e-mails from him, too.

He was persistent, she'd give him that. Which was part of the reason he'd lasted as her friend for so long. All the others had gotten sick of her always studying and not being the typical teenage girl who would talk on the phone two hours every day.

“It's Mr. Reynolds.”

As in Coach Reynolds. Did she want to talk to him? She rubbed between Britney's ears. Her wrist and nose hurt, which meant the painkillers were wearing off. At least she wouldn't be loopy talking to him.

In her gut, she knew what the topic of conversation was going to be.

“I'll use the phone in here.” She hadn't heard the phone ring because she always kept the ringer off. That way she didn't lose her concentration when she was in the middle of a trigonometry equation. Jayne picked up the phone and covered the mouthpiece before hitting the TALK button. “Hang up, Ellie!”

Once she heard the click, Jayne spoke. She tried to make her voice sound like it usually did. Confident. “Hi, Coach.”

“Good to hear your voice, Jayne. I just wanted to see if you were okay after, uh, the other day.”

“I'm doing good.” Even in her current state, she couldn't let her grammar mistake go by uncorrected. “I mean I'm doing well, thank you.”

“Heard you hurt your arm?”

“Yeah. Well, the wrist. My nose is in a splint, but that should go away in a couple of weeks.” The neck brace had been more annoying than helpful and now sat in the dark under her bed.

“I wish you could finish out the season with us. Especially since this would've been the first year we had a junior be captain
and
first seed.”

She felt something hot and prickly in her eyes. She blinked, willing the tears to go away. “Yeah, me too. But there's always next year, right?”

“Exactly. Next year.” Coach cleared his throat. “So, Jayne, I wanted you to hear it from me first before you read it in the
Javelina
.”

Since Jayne was the features editor, she knew exactly what he was about to tell her. Her throat closed up and she felt her nose start to run.
You will not cry. You will
not
cry. You deserve this
. “What's that, Coach Reynolds?”

“I made Missy captain.”

She knew the words were coming. They still hurt all the same, though.

“Anyway, with everything you're going through, this whole captain business probably isn't high on your list of priorities, right?” He laughed, and it sounded nervous.

Jayne felt the room start to close in on her. She got up and opened the blinds.

Across the street, the Travises' minivan was coated with dust. Someone had etched GO JAVELINAS! on the back window. Judy Travis had been her partner in chemistry, but Judy'd had a bad habit of whispering when the teacher was talking. Jayne had eventually lied to Mrs. Pollock about a draft from the air conditioner and early-onset arthritis and had been moved four seats over.

“You there, Jayne?”

“Yeah.” At least she didn't feel like crying right now. She was too busy thinking about normal teenagers. And how she'd been trying so hard for so long not to be one of them.

“You okay with everything?”

For a second, she thought he was talking about her life. No, she wasn't okay. But she wasn't about to use Coach as a phone counselor. The man taught history and wore the same gym shorts in two different colors to class every day. “I'm good, Coach. Really.”

“Good, good.” He cleared his throat again, a lengthy affair that made her hold the phone a few inches from her ear. “I'm still at the tennis courts. We had a match against Central. Won all but one of the matches.”

He paused, like he was waiting for Jayne to congratulate him. What did she care?

There was a girl hooked to a ventilator. Because of her. Tennis matches weren't that important in comparison.

“Well, I better get going,” Coach said. “Mrs. Reynolds needs some foil for a chicken she's baking tonight. I'll see you in the halls on Monday?”

Jayne ran a finger over the flat surface of one white blind. She listened with half an ear to the tinny sound it made. “Sounds good. I'll see you then.”

As she hung up, she slowly closed the blinds, shutting out the world and a car proclaiming, GO JAVELINAS!

8

HAVE YOU SEEN my medic alert bracelet?”

Jayne pushed her scrambled eggs into the bacon, making them touch and ignoring Ellie and yet another of Ellie's demands. Ellie wanting eggs. Dad making Ellie's eggs. The eggs being runny and inedible.

Just like Ellie liked them.

“No, I have not.” Now that the eggs were touching the meat, she didn't have to put up a front about eating them. Even her mother knew she didn't eat food that touched.

Today was the first day she'd be back in school. Jayne concentrated on smushing the eggs down, pushing the liquid yolk out of the gelatinous mound. Right now, getting the liquid squeezed out of her eggs was her number-one priority.

It kept her from thinking about . . . other things.

Which wasn't realistic. Not while she was sitting here already sweating in the navy trousers and white blouse her mom had picked out for her. The outfit she'd wear to see the lawyer after school.

There was no reason to think. Not with the notebook of questions her mom had painstakingly dictated to Diane. Questions Jayne had spent three hours answering late last night to keep her mind off the pile of books with a week's worth of undone homework in them.

Her mom had edited her answers, too. Like the question that asked, “Were you distracted when you were driving?” In place of the paragraph where she'd detailed checking her cell-phone caller ID, her mom had scratched through her words and had written, “Just the usual amount of distraction a driver faces from day to day.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

Jayne looked up at Ellie. Her life was so simple, and it didn't hurt any that she looked like a movie star in the making. Her skin was as flawless as Kate Winslet's or some other English actress's.

Jayne? She was fighting a losing battle with an angry, bulbous stress pimple on her right cheek. Reminiscent of the vicious pimples those
Survivor
people got after three weeks without soap or Proactiv.

“Why don't you just use your backup bracelet?” Jayne concentrated on the food in front of her, never having felt less hungry in her life.

She had exactly eight hours and thirty-seven minutes until she met with the lawyer. Until she found out how much more her life was going to change. Which was a weird concept for a girl who'd planned every aspect of her life since she was three.

From when Ken and Barbie were ready to get married, to which college Jayne would eventually apply to.

She went to the sink and scraped her untouched breakfast into the garbage disposal, careful not to let her cast get wet. Ellie stood next to her, frantically looking through a pile of
Arizona Republic
s.

Jayne rolled her eyes as the eggs slipped down the drain. “The bracelet's probably in your gym locker.”

Ellie started pulling open kitchen drawers, rifling through their organized contents. “Why do you say that?”

Jayne stifled a sigh as she went over to a kitchen chair to zip up her messenger bag. “Because that's where you've left it at least two other times.”

She took one last look inside her bag. French book, chemistry book,
The Scarlet Letter
. Everything she needed was there for her first day back at school.

Whoopee.

She straightened and saw her belt buckle wasn't centered with her shirt buttons. She didn't bother doing anything about it. Or the cuff that had come undone on her right pant leg. Jayne just wanted to be in her pj's. That sounded good about now. So did popping a few of those pain pills, taking a marathon nap, and snuggling with Britney. Life would be perfect if she could just stay home.

Okay, maybe not perfect, but at least she'd be away from the real world. Where people knew about . . . Where people knew. Thanks to the midday, five o'clock, six o'clock, and nine o'clock news.

Jayne sat down and looked at the clock. It was time to go. Time to get the day over with. “Where's Dad?”

Ellie had given up her bracelet search and was leaning against the kitchen counter, eating M&M's. She shrugged. “Dunno.” She dumped the last M&M into her mouth. “Don't tell Dad I can't find it. He'll write his number on me in Magic Marker or something.”

A week ago, Jayne would've lectured Ellie about eating that candy crap. It wasn't good for her diabetes.

It also wasn't good for her diabetes to be going outside without her bracelet after eating a handful of M&M's.

Today, though, Jayne sat down and put her forehead on top of her crossed arms.

She heard the jingle jangle of pocket change a few seconds before her dad rushed in. She lifted her head, the movement cracking her neck. God, she was tense.

Her dad took a traveler's mug out of the cupboard. “Good, you're both here.” He filled the mug with the green iced tea he'd made the night before. “I was hung up on a conference call with U of A.”

He looked around, patting his blazer's pockets. “Insulin. Did Jaynie give you your shot, Ellie?”

Ellie shook her head. “Not yet. She's been too busy getting ready for school.”

Jayne wanted to put her head back down on her arms and shut out her sister. Whatever. Ellie had had plenty of time to ask her. She was just being self-centered, like always.

Like Gen.

Jayne didn't say anything as she went to the fridge. On top of everything else going on today, she didn't want to get into an argument with Ellie. On autopilot, like she'd done a thousand times before, she pulled out a vial and started rolling it with her good hand against the side of her leg, mixing together the milky liquid inside.

“I'll swab the decks, Captain.” Their dad mock-saluted Ellie and took a cotton ball out of the jar by the fridge and soaked it with the bottle of rubbing alcohol beside it. “Where are we doing this one today?”

Ellie pulled down her waistband a few inches on her left hip. She looked up at the kitchen light. “You almost ready, Jayne?”

Her back to her dad and sister, Jayne pressed her lips together. Ellie was begging for a fight. The little jerk wasn't going to get one, though.

After checking the syringe for air bubbles, Jayne pinched the flesh at Ellie's hip and pushed the needle into the skin. Ever since her sister had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age six, it had fallen on either their dad or, in the last four years or so, Jayne to give Ellie the shot three times a day. At school, the nurse did it.

No one else could do it, though. Or rather, would do it. Their mom's gag reflex activated whenever she saw a needle, and Ellie couldn't stomach giving herself the shot.

Their dad gave Ellie a fresh cotton ball with alcohol to clean up the tiny dot of blood from the puncture. Jayne threw the used syringe into a lidded plastic container and wondered what the garbage men must think of them. Did they think they were a bunch of drug addicts?

With everything else that had happened recently, Jayne could just imagine the headlines if one of the local networks saw their trash.
Jayne Thompkins Turns to Drugs to Forget Tragedy!

If she had been another kind of girl—an average, wimpy girl—maybe she'd turn to drugs. But she was Jayne Lee Thompkins: straight-A, Harvard-bound Jayne Lee Thompkins.

She didn't do that kind of thing.

9

THERE WERE CAMERAS in front of the school.

There. Were. Cameras.

Jayne started to scoot down in her seat. She wanted to slide down to the floor. But she didn't. In fact, she straightened up. She had never hidden from anyone. Ever. Then again, she'd never done anything in her life that she had to hide from.

“Jayne!” One of the vultures with a mike had seen her. He started walking toward her like a man working out on a treadmill. One by one, the rest of the reporters realized where he was heading and followed. With that same quick, determined stride.

“Jesus.” That word coming from her dad was unexpected. He rarely swore. “Your mother and I were hoping they wouldn't be here.”

“Oh my God.” Ellie pulled against Jayne's seat, leaning over and looking out the front windshield. “There are so many freakin' cameras! Does my hair look all right?”

“Why are
they
here?” Jayne felt her stomach clench, and she willed herself not to puke up the two bites of eggs that had gone down there.

Her dad let out a long breath. “Probably because they couldn't get near you at the house.”

Since Jayne had gotten home, the news vans had been at the end of the driveway, off their property. The vultures knew they couldn't push their legal boundaries when it came to the queen of all vultures.

But they'd gone away after a couple of days. They'd gotten their shots of the house, the background for their news stories. So why were they here?