Out of Order (10 page)

“Go tell him we’re leaving.”

Ricky took a deep, wheezy breath and then walked up to Mike.

“No no, you guys can’t leave yet!” boomed Mike, clearly displeased by Ricky’s quiet good-bye. “We haven’t even played seven minutes in heaven!” Ricky tried to tug on his sleeve, but he shrugged her off. A cheer went up through the crowd at the mention of the game. “Who’s first? Corey’s about to leave, let’s give her this one!”

“I’m going home. I’m not playing!” I yelled over the crowd, but no one seemed to hear. Someone grabbed me from behind—a big guy I didn’t recognize.

“Who else, who’s next…?” Mike tapped at his chin, seemingly mulling it over. “Lisa, darling, you’re about done with your drink. Let’s have some hot lesbian action before this night is over!”

No one had to grab Lisa. She went along willingly, leering at me. The crowd began to cheer as I was steered toward a coat closet that was hardly big enough to fit two people inside. I caught Ricky’s eye while she desperately tugged at Mike’s sleeve until he leaned his head down to her mouth and she cupped her hand around his ear.

“What’s going on? Hey, let her go!” Out of nowhere, my saviors arrived. Brandon Reyes, Jessa’s long-term boyfriend and a friend of his I didn’t know by name pulled the jerk who had grabbed me away. I ducked between the two of them, my chest heaving from my struggle to get loose.

“Just a friendly game of seven minutes in heaven!” Lisa crowed, and Mike echoed the words exactly a moment later, as though scripted, and then followed them with the words that would earn him one hell of a shiner:

“Let her play! Unless
you’d
rather get her in the closet? Seeing as your own girlfriend won’t—”

I can’t say I wasn’t expecting Brandon to punch Mike, but when it happened, I stood stock-still with shock. “Run!” Brandon’s friend whispered, and I turned tail and booked it out the front door, left open from the pair’s arrival.

Brandon met us outside on the driveway moments later, Ricky caught up under one of his incredibly long arms. “You girls alright? What the hell was that?” he spluttered, his cheek reddening from where Mike had obviously gotten a hit in.

“Lemme go,” Ricky said, squirming out from under Brandon’s arm. “He wasn’t trying to out you, Corey, he was trying to set you two up! Lisa actually likes you!”

“I’m not interested,” I said, feeling a hot flush move across my cheeks. “I mean, she’s pretty and all, but—”

“Corey’s not gay, and that was a rotten thing to do,” Brandon finished for me. I actually was going to say that I wasn’t sure if I liked girls, but he was trying to defend me, so I let it go. The bisexuality debate could happen later. Or never. Whichever.

“Why do you like him?” Brandon’s friend said, meeting Ricky’s eyes curiously.

“Robert,” Brandon said warningly, putting a name to the face. It was enough to spark my recognition. Robert Shay, I remembered, matching the dark, shining face to his picture in the yearbook.

“He’s a sweetheart, really,” she huffed and then said quite calmly, “You can go home if you want to, Corey, but I want to stay.” It sounded rehearsed: Mike’s words in her mouth.

I put up my hands defensively. “Go ahead. I’m going home. I’m not sticking around after that.” A piece of me, and not an insignificant one, wished Ricky would turn around and come back when she headed back to the party. I felt slighted by my best friend. Over what? A boy?

“She’s got to make her own mistakes,” Brandon said after Ricky disappeared through the front door.

“I feel like this is going to be a bad one,” I replied, crossing my arms over my chest. The costume felt incredibly small now, as I stood alone and shivering in the driveway.

“I’ll drive you home. I’m not much for parties without Jess anyway. I only came because Mike asked, and clearly he’s wasted.” Brandon turned to his friend with a sad smile. “You coming too, or—?”

“I could… hang back and look out for Erica,” he suggested quietly, his eyes trained on his sneakers. “Make sure Mike doesn’t try anything.”

“That would make me feel infinitely better about leaving her here alone,” I said, trying to catch his eye. I didn’t succeed. “Thank you, Robert.”

He nodded, and wandered slowly back up the driveway as Brandon led me to his truck. “Thanks for sticking up for me. And for punching Mike in the face,” I said as I climbed into his passenger’s seat and did up the seat belt snugly. I had to adjust it so that it didn’t cut me awkwardly across the throat, having been used more recently by Robert, who was much taller than me.

“You’re friends with Jessa,” he said, shrugging. “That makes you a friend of mine too.” He paused, key in the ignition. “Robert has a thing for Ricky. But he’s really shy.”

“She’ll come around. No way will that jerk Mike hold her attention for long.” I paused too, biting my lip. “But it’s like you said. She has to make her own mistakes.”

Brandon sighed. “Sometimes I wish we could stop this stuff from happening. You see the train wreck coming a mile away, but there’s no way to stop it.” He smiled and then awkwardly patted my arm. As though suddenly realizing how cold I was, he reached into the backseat with his monkey-arms for a blanket and tossed it over my bare legs.

I felt a sudden kinship with him then, the young man I rarely saw outside of his admittedly gag-worthy interactions with Jessa. There was more to him than the kissy-face and the daisies left in Jessa’s locker.

“A train wreck,” I repeated, smoothing the blanket over my legs as Brandon started the car. That sounded like an apt description. “And it’s going to hurt her. He’s going to hurt her.”

“N
O
, M
IKE
!”
I startled myself awake with a yell, still half-dreaming of that night in October. My tenuous connection to that night snapped like a rubber band, leaving only the too-tight cuffs of my pajamas to remind me of that blasted Tinker Bell costume.

With a thunder of footsteps up the stairs, my mother burst through the door, a flurry of red hair and white powder. I stared at her blankly as she stood frozen in the doorway, as though she’d startled herself.

“Are you okay?” she asked after a long moment of maintained eye contact. “I heard you yell out.”

“I had a bad dream,” I said, absently scratching at my arm. “What’s that you’re covered in?”

“Flour,” my mother supplied, coming to the side of my bed slowly, as if approaching a deer in the forest. “I’m making pancakes.”

“You never make pancakes,” I said, but she ignored me. “Pancakes are for birthdays.”
Or for when your friends get brutally murdered
, my brain supplied. I flinched at the invasive thought.

My mom sat down on the edge of my bed and reached for my hair, pulling at the sleep-loosened curls. “Your head must hurt, after sleeping on all these pins….”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I mumbled, closing my eyes while she carded through my hair, pulling out stray bobby pins. I’d forgotten they were there, hadn’t given them a passing thought since Kate had slid them into place so effortlessly I hadn’t felt them pinch or tug all night.

“Did you dream about—?” My mom’s hands jerked a little in my hair before resuming their soothing motion. “Sorry.”

“No,” I sighed. “About that fight I had with Ricky on Halloween.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I shouldn’t have let her date Mike. He treated her like property right from the beginning.” I felt as if my throat was closing in on itself, but the words didn’t stop pushing through it. “If she’d gone out with Robert instead, maybe she would’ve gone home with him after prom. Maybe she wouldn’t have been at the diner with us when—”

My mother’s hands stopped moving in my hair and instead fell to my shoulders, gripping me hard. “Don’t think like that. Hey, no. Stop, Cor. Corinna!” She shook me back and forth roughly, and I opened my eyes to glare at her. The tears began to fall immediately, thick and wet where they clung to my eyelashes. “You girls do everything together. This is
not
your fault.” Her voice cracked on the word fault. “You are not to blame for this.”

“I was in the bathroom! Alone!” I croaked, tears salty in the corners of my mouth. “We always go to the bathroom together. Always. I should have made one of them come with me! Or all of them. I shouldn’t have gone alone.”

“Then you’d all be dead,” my mother whispered. “He’d have found you in the bathroom and killed all of you, right in front of each other. You could have been killed, Corinna. This isn’t a game of ‘what if’ that you want to play.”

I didn’t want to say what I was thinking: that being dead was preferable to being alive without them, that I should have been sitting at that table with them, that I should have run out the moment I heard the shot and tried to jump the man with the gun to save them. The sudden beeping of our fire alarm saved me from having one of those traitorous thoughts slip out.

“Oh shit,” my mom groaned, jumping off my bed and throwing open my bedroom door. Immediately the room began to smell like burning sugar. “Pancakes.” She was gone in an instant, her heavy footfalls on the stairway followed immediately by my father’s much lighter ones. My mother always managed to walk with the weight of an elephant, despite weighing a hundred and ten pounds, if that.

I scratched at my arms again where the tight cuffs had rubbed and then looked down, confused by the texture of my skin. Specks of dried blood clung to the hairs on my arms in flakes. I hadn’t washed it off before bed.

Gagging, I stumbled to my feet. When I reached the landing, the alarm had been shut off and the smoke was already dissipating. “I’m taking a shower!” I yelled down the stairs, though it sounded garbled to my own ears. My throat felt clogged and thick.

My dad appeared at the bottom of the stairs, drying wet hands on a plaid dish towel. I could hear my mother swearing bitterly from the kitchen, still cleaning up her mess. “You’re taking a shower?” he asked breathlessly. He looked as though he hadn’t slept at all. At my wordless, jerky nod, he added, “Leave the bathroom door unlocked.”

I nodded again and turned sharply into the open bathroom door, closing it behind me but not locking it. We had never been a pee-with-the-door-open kind of family. I had to make the conscious decision not to press down the lock on the doorknob, going against the ingrained motion. I wasn’t foolish. I knew why he’d asked. He didn’t want me to fill the tub and slit my wrists. If I took too long, they’d check up on me.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about being a suicide risk, but it wasn’t a good feeling.

I turned on the shower at full heat and then stripped out of the confining koala pajamas. There was some blood on my hands and arms, but the biggest smudges were on my knees, calves and feet, where I’d kneeled in it. I stepped into the still-cold stream of water and scratched at the blood on my arms, desperate for it to go away.

I’d have to get my dad to change the sheets before I went back into my room. I didn’t want to find any trace of blood there, a reminder of the bodies of my friends, still warm, as I bent over them—

I gagged viciously and spit the taste of bile into the drain. I braced one hand on the shower wall and hung my head, taking deep breaths, trying hard not to retch. The water had warmed up to a comfortable level, but I allowed it to get hotter and hotter, knowing that I’d scald myself if I didn’t turn it down soon.

Standing motionless in the shower, I watched the drain. The water swirled pink with the blood from my knees and feet, round and round in an endless circle. I wouldn’t come out until long after the water had run clear, still seeing blood where there was none.

“S
TOP
BLEEDING
all over the place,” I laughed. “You’re bleeding all over me!”

Kate pooched her bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout. “Oh,
hardly
. Look, I barely got any on your towel.” She held out the beach blanket for scrutiny, pointing out where a few drops of blood stained the yellow polka dots.

I shook my head and turned on one of the many showers in the wooden hut that masqueraded as a change room. One wall was covered in tiny lockers you could rent for one dollar. Directly opposite was a row of showerheads with no curtains and, in a dimly lit corner, a single toilet stall and rusty sink that sat unused except in dire emergencies.

“Come here.”

Kate hopped obediently over to me and put her foot under the ice-cold stream, leaning against the wall with one hand for balance. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies,” she said conversationally, wrapping her other arm around herself and shivering. She was dressed in tiny jean shorts and a crop top over her bathing suit, midriff exposed. “This is the place where horror movies start.”

Her blood circled the drain in the middle of the room slowly. It seemed to suck and gurgle almost ominously, as though some horror-movie sludge were about to splutter from it.

I laughed it off as I crouched down on the rough concrete floor, careful to not actually sit. The thought of people’s bare feet on the floor and all the bacteria and fungi that could be transferred that way freaked me out to no end. I put the first aid kit rescued from the empty lifeguard tower down just outside the radius of the spray and opened it.

Holding out one hand, I said “Foot,” as a doctor might say, “Scalpel,” during surgery. Kate pulled her foot out of the water and put it in my hand, barely flinching as I pulled at the jagged edge of the cut on the inside of her delicate arch. I ran one hand up her calf unconsciously, trying to comfort her. It was smooth, freshly shaved that morning. “It’s not that bad.”

“It doesn’t even hurt that much anymore,” she said, “but um….” Kate put one hand on my head to steady herself as I began to root through the first aid kit for antibacterial wipes or creams. “About that night….”

“What night?” I asked, finding some Neosporin and holding it up triumphantly. I raised my eyes to meet hers but instead of a smile, I was greeted with a serious expression. Kate’s lips were pressed tight together, her nostrils flared. “Oh.”