Echols, Jennifer (19 page)

I watched across the clearing, waiting. Finally I heard the low hum of the car's motor. Then the car itself emerged from the trees, blue lights off but headlights on. He drove too fast across the clearing and skidded to a stop in the gravel. A cloud of dust rose in front of the headlights and hung in the still dawn air.

He got out of the car, strode toward the bridge, stopped in front of the
No Trespassing sign.
I could tell from the way he moved that he hadn't seen the city's new installation before. A new sign bolted below the
No Trespassing
sign said
SMILE! You 're being watched by the Police Department.
He turned around and looked for the camera mounted high on a tree.

Then he brought his phone up to his ear. "Is this your surprise for me?" His tone was absolutely flat. But he caught an extra breath at the end, like he was trying hard to stay calm.

"I figured you would have seen it by now, on one of your many trips down here to the bridge on your shift all night."

"I didn't get out of the car." He took two hard breaths in the phone. "Does the camera really feed back to the police station?"

"Yes. Lois is watching us right now. Say hi." I waved in a broad motion that the camera could pick up this far away.

"Meg, you're doing exactly what you got arrested for in the first place."

"I let Lois know what I was doing so she wouldn't tell on me. The only reason it's illegal is that it's not safe. I've already informed you that for the next fifteen minutes, it's safe."

"Somehow, I don't think the DA is going to buy that." His words sounded rational, but his voice was drawn tight underneath.

"Yeah, I should have run away from you and started college and gone on without you. But I would always have regretted it if I didn't give this a shot." I pulled back his leather cop jacket, so maybe he could see even from a distance that I was wearing his
To Protect and Serve
T-shirt. "Come and get me. You have fifteen minutes before the train comes." I glanced at my watch. "Twelve."

He was breathing so hard that he exhaled static into the phone. I could see his shoulders rising and falling in the dim light.

"Come on, John. You're the bravest person I've ever met."

In a rush, he closed the rest of the space across the clearing and put one foot on the bridge.

"Take your shoes off, so you don't get trapped," I suggested. "I want to keep you safe."

I heard him curse before he pocketed his phone and bent to unlace his boots. He cursed again, muffled, like he couldn't get them unlaced fast enough. Then he straightened and stepped in his socks across the ties, toward me.

He raised the phone to his ear. "Aren't you supposed to be at work right now?" he asked in that strange, flat voice.

"I have a few minutes. I got Purcell to stay a little late at the end of his shift."

"I thought you didn't get along that well with Purcell." He was only yards away from me, coming fast across the railroad ties, without glancing down at his feet.

"This was important."

"It took a lot of planning," he said in the strange voice. He was a few steps away. His dark eyes didn't look loving. And they didn't look afraid.

That was the first hint something was terribly wrong.

I knew I'd better start explaining myself, or I was going to be in trouble. "Now that the camera's here, there's no reason for your body to stay, guarding this bridge. But your mind would still be here. I thought it might help you to come up on the bridge, so you could stop wondering. See what the dead girl saw."

This was likely not what she saw. I didn't know what time of day those kids got creamed, but if they were drunk, it was probably night. The nighttime view from the bridge was beautiful, but there wasn't a whole lot to see, surrounded by darkness. So I'd banked on bringing John here at sunrise, when we could see more.

And I was right. The faintest hint of pink in the sky reflected far below us in the river, flat as glass. Mist rose from the water and curled up to me. Dark pines and trees with new green leaves clung desperately to the violent angle of the gorge.

I put my phone down. "And feel what they felt." As John stepped close to me, I put my other hand on his bare arm.

"Don't touch me," he barked.

I looked into his hard eyes. My heart skipped a beat as I recognized that look. The look Eric had gotten in his eyes when I pushed him beyond control, and nothing but anger was left.

"John," I said quickly. "I'm sorry. I thought—" "Poor judgment." He snapped a cold handcuff around my wrist.

I fought him without thinking, with the vaguest awareness that I'd struck him and hurt him somehow. Then my shoulder hit the rusty wall of the trestle, and the
bang
echoed against the hills. Through blinking red lights, I was looking over at the pink river, watching both our cell phones fall into the mist.

Already I was half gone, wondering whether the fish would run up my minutes, when he said, "Don't resist arrest," and slapped the handcuff around my other wrist.

Chapter 18

I was a skeleton. I leaned over Meg's hospital bed, the Meg that used to be. She slept. I reached down and brushed pink hair away from her face. It came out in a clump, and the strands slipped through my finger bones.

*

"After?" said Lois.

*

"John!" said Lois.

The second time, I roused enough to know Lois was calling on John's radio attached to his shirt. John had slung me over his hard shoulder, which dug into my belly with each step he took. Nose to his back, I smelled his sweat. Strange that I recognized his scent so readily. But there was no cologne mixed with it. He'd become someone else.

"I can see you on camera, John," said Lois. "I saw what you did."

*

Slowly I realized I was in the backseat of the police car, on my stomach, face stuck to the vinyl. Men murmured outside.

The talking escalated as the door opened behind me. "That's why she passed out." I recognized the voice of Quincy, my paramedic friend. "Uncuff her, would you?"

I felt the cuffs slide off my wrists, but I still couldn't move.

"Why does she do that?" Officer Leroy asked.

"Panic attack." I felt Quincy leaning over me. "Come here, you rascal."

My face peeled away from the vinyl. He slid me backward across the seat and picked me up. I clung to him with his shirt bunched in both my fists, like he was my father.

"You need to get over this, sugar," he murmured. "It's completely psychosomatic. You were sick four years ago." He set me on the back bumper of the ambulance and held me steady with one hand while he reached for something.

"Not the—" The smelling salts razored through my nostrils and into my brain. At least I could see clearly again: Quincy standing in front of me, weathered face lined with concern, and Officer Leroy hovering behind him.

"Where's John?" I asked.

"Where's John," Officer Leroy muttered. He shook his finger at me. "John is having his own panic attack. That's a nice stunt you pulled, missy. You know his brother got killed on that bridge."

I tried to gasp, but it was so hard to breathe. "His
brother?"
I coughed out.

Quincy caught me as I started forward. Over his shoulder, he said to Officer Leroy, "You could maybe wait to tell her that later."

"John said it was a girl who lived in his neighborhood," I wailed.

"Right," said Officer Leroy. "That was his brother's girlfriend."

"Oh God." I tried to stand up, but Quincy pressed me back, saying, "Easy, now."

"And that's just between us," Officer Leroy insisted. "Most folks on the force don't know, or they don't understand that's why After joined. If the chief found out, he might kick After off. This is After's whole life, and you persist in treating it like it's a
joke?"
Officer Leroy stepped closer to me like he wanted to throttle me. When Quincy put his hands up, motioning for Officer Leroy to back off, Officer Leroy raised his voice and shouted at me instead. "Don't you go over there. You don't poke at a snake. You try to go over to him again and I'll handcuff you myself."

It all made sense now. A father who had moved to Colorado. A mother who had moved to Virginia because she couldn't stand it anymore. A framed family portrait from ten years back, with a brother who had also left town —except John had not made clear exactly where his brother had gone. A black handprint on the colorful wall in the park when John was nine.

I'd gotten so used to hearing it in the past week that I didn't even notice the low hum until the train sounded its deafening horn. We all turned to look. John stood with his back to us at the rail in front of the bridge. His head was bowed. He didn't look up at the train. He didn't cover his ears.

The low hum I thought I'd been hearing for the past two weeks had been the train in John's head all along.

I crossed my arms and hugged myself, but it was no use. I whispered, "What have we done to each other?"

I did something I hadn’t done since sophomore year, when the doctor told me I was in remission. I cried.

I cried so much that Quincy didn't want to let me ride to Eggstra! Eggstra! on my motorcycle. There was no way I was getting in the ambulance at that point, much less a cop car. He finally settled for letting me ride my motorcycle and following me in the ambulance, with Officer Leroy behind him. We left John at the bridge.

I cried as I tripped through the door of the trailer and tore off John's police jacket and
To Protect and Serve
T-shirt, which had begun to sear my skin. Of course, I had to wear something to work, but laundry had not been high on my priority list for the past week.

The first shirt I grabbed from my closet was my Cookie Monster T-shirt. I'd always loved the CM, an uninhibited glutton who lived like he was dying. I'd stopped wearing the T-shirt when I dyed my hair blue because the CM and I matched a little too well. But I didn't have time to search for something else this morning. Purcell had already stayed almost an hour late for me.

I cried as I burst through the door of Eggstra! Eggstra!, shoulders squared for the huge argument I was about to have with Purcell that would send half the customers running from the packed diner. But when Purcell and Corey saw me, they both left food burning to rush over to me and ask what was wrong.

I cried harder. Their anger I could have dealt with. I didn't know what to do with sympathy. "I'm okay. I'm fine," I choked out. "Just a little teen angst. Nothing to see here."

Corey ran back to the grill to flip the ham, then reluctantly raked it into the trash. Purcell still stood next to me. Looking at the floor, he mumbled, "Take another hour. I can stay."

"Oh, no. Working will help me. And you've stayed so long already." I wiped at the tears under my eyes. "Do you want me to teach you to read?"

He looked as shocked as I felt at hearing myself. I went on, "I don't know how to teach someone to read, but there are workbooks and stuff I can check out of the high school library. Are you on day shift next week?"

He nodded.

"We can do it after school, in the lull before the dinner crowd."

He held up his fist. I wasn't sure what to do, but I touched his fist with my fist. This seemed to be right, because he took off his apron and headed out the door. I guessed he had accepted my offer with thanks. It was hard to tell, since we'd just now become friends.

I tried to dry up as Corey and I cooked breakfast for the throngs of people from the car factory who got off work at 7 a.m. and the travelers headed home from spring break. But every time I saw the reflection of my Cookie Monster T-shirt in the toaster, I wanted to pull my hair out.

Hours later, toward the end of my shift, after the lunch crowd had thinned, I called Tiffany. Again, I didn't know who was more shocked: Tiffany, that I was calling her, or me, that I was calling her. Soon she be-bopped in and slid onto a stool at the counter.

I poured her a cup of coffee. "Sorry to drag you up here on your one weekend of spring break left."

"No prob. It's not like I have a boyfriend to hang out with or something. I've been asleep since Thursday." She eyed the coffee. I moved the cream and sugar toward her as a hint. She mixed some in clumsily, like a coffee virgin. Then she looked up at me, and her face fell into concern. "Oh my God, Meg, what's wrong?"

What
wasn't
wrong? I told her the whole story of how John took me to the beach, we almost had sex, I induced his nervous breakdown accidentally, and he gave me a panic attack on purpose.

When I finished, she sat blinking at me for a few seconds. Then she exclaimed,
"You had sex with Johnafter?"

I glanced around the diner at the patrons trying not to stare at us. "I told you, no," I said quietly. "But I saw the promised land."

She looked right into my eyes with a steady gaze. "Is he a good kisser?"

I held her gaze. "John does
everything
well." Then I watched my hand wipe absently at the counter. "I should set the record straight about something I said to you on the phone Wednesday. I still don't think it's a good idea for you to have sex with Brian just to get back together with him. But since you came to me for sex advice, I want to revise what I told you about sex not being any good. With Eric, I was half thinking about something else. With John, there was nothing but John. The frontal lobes fizzled out on me, and only the trusty old medulla was still operating. There was nothing going on but breathing"—I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly—"and touching. Now I can see how sex could be really, really fantastic if the guy was slow and caring and thorough and obviously very into you, and if you were in love." I was so tired of crying by then that I watched with a weird detachment as my tears plopped onto the countertop in small wet circles.

"How are you going to get him back?" Tiffany asked.

I sniffled. "That's why I called you. I want to dye my hair its natural color. Of course,
natural color
is a relative term. When I get off work in a minute, will you go across the street to the drugstore with me and help me figure out what shade my hair used to be?"

"Wow," Tiffany said. "It's hard to remember back that far. Wasn't it dark brown? And with your blue eyes, you're going to look striking. Wow." She took a sip of her coffee and grimaced. "You think dying your hair will get Johnafter back?"

I glanced at my reflection in the toaster. "I think it will help me connect with him. You know, John's going to live in this town forever. And there's nothing I'd less rather do. But I'm almost to the point with him that I'd be willing to live in a triple-wide and bake warm fruit cobbler for him and listen to the police scanner while he was at work." Tiffany choked on her coffee. "You
are?*
"No, I'm definitely not. I
almost am.
I'll never quite get there. I have too much fear of becoming my parents. But I feel this connection with John. I can't discount him just because it's inconvenient. And it
would be
inconvenient. I want to go to college. I want to live in Key West. I want to see the world. But I think if I keep going at this rate, I'll see the world by myself. I'll move to Key West by myself, and live there by myself, and leave again by myself. I never realized that's what I've been doing. I mean, look at my hair. I get along here in town because people here have always known me. No one at college will know me. And if you see someone you don't know with blue hair, around here where the manga aesthetic is hardly the norm, what do you think to yourself? Blue hair says
stay away from me"
I ran my fingers down one strand and held it out in front of my eyes to study it. "But you think if I dye it brown right after all this happened with John, it will look like I'm desperate to get him back?"

"No," she said slowly. "Not now that you've explained it. I think it will look like you've finally decided you're not dying of leukemia."

Oh.

My parents would be happy about that.

As they were driving away to Graceland, I had asked my dad to bring me back a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. He told me they weren't bringing me shit. My mom would probably try to sneak me a teddy bear wearing an Elvis T-shirt or something equally cutesy anyway. But when they got back tomorrow night and saw my brown hair, yeah. They would wish they'd bought me that blue jean jacket with the Graceland mansion Bedazzled on the back, I just knew it. And then I would sit them down and have a heart-to-heart with them, and I would apologize. For everything.

Tiffany pushed her coffee away. "When do you think you'll see John again? Are you planning to rob a bank?"

"Ha. He may be at a college party in Birmingham tonight. That was the other reason I called you. I need you to go with me."

"No way," she said. "I don't want to drink."

"Believe me, I don't want you to drink. Ever. Again. You don't have to drink. A college party isn't that big a deal. It's a lot like a high school party. The boys are still stupid. They're just taller and hold their liquor better."

"Why do I have to go with you?" she whined.

"I'm not positive John will be there. He might stay away to avoid seeing me. And Eric might be there. You know how drunk he'll be. It would help if I went with someone to run interference for me."

"Meg, if you think John won't be there and Eric will, robbing a bank sounds like a better idea to get John's attention."

I shook my head. Blue strands fell into my eyes. I pushed them out of my face in annoyance. "Will Billingsley will be there. I need to talk to him. We've had a few chats about John and the bridge, and he never warned me about John's brother."

"Will Billingsley?" She perked up and leaned forward. "I used to have a little crush on Will Billingsley. We were on the debate team together."

I rolled my eyes. "I swear, Tiff, if my ass made good grades, you'd want to date my ass."

"Hey!" She slapped her hand on the counter. "You have a thing for jail. You date boys in it, and you date boys who put other boys in it. I have a thing for good grades. Which is more healthy?"

"That settles it," I said. "Tonight we'll go on a boy-hunt together. Maybe this outing will turn out better than our last outing."