Out of Order (8 page)

I joined the throng of confused future graduates bumbling around outside the auditorium doors and immediately began searching for my friends. Jessa waved me over when she saw me craning my neck around much taller students. Her waves of dark hair stood out in a sea of blonde dye-jobs and colorful hair extensions.

“Where’s Kate?” I asked, having to raise my voice to be heard over the mass of conversations surrounding us. She exaggeratedly jerked her head to her left, a clear “follow me.”

I followed her through the press of bodies at the door, all hoping to get seats near the back of the auditorium so they could mess around without being seen or heard. We finally reached open air just as they opened the auditorium doors, and the crowd began to shuffle through them. Jessa carefully took my hand and led me around the corner, out of sight of the hall monitors directing traffic.

“Kate’s having a malfunction,” she whispered dramatically, although we were very much out of earshot. “Ricky’s with her now.”

Jessa had released my hand, but I still kept close to her side as we picked our way down the empty hallway, careful to avoid open classroom doors as underclassmen continued to take notes or goof off, whichever the case may have been.

“What kind of malfunction?” I hissed after we passed Mr. Williamson’s classroom, where he continued to drone on without noticing us hurrying past his doorway. His loud, monotonous voice followed us to the end of the hallway.

Jessa didn’t have a chance to answer before she was pulling me into the bathroom by the stairwell, the one everyone avoided because it backed onto the teacher’s lounge. “Everyone’s in class or the aud,” Jessa said loudly as the door swung shut behind us. “I brought Corinna.”

“Corey, please tell me you have a spare set of clothes in your locker,” Kate moaned from behind a closed stall door, her voice high-pitched and a little desperate. “I forgot what day it was.”

“I don’t think I do,” I said. “Sorry, Kate.”

“Well then I guess I’m going out on stage like this,” Kate said and unlocked the stall. She walked past me, looking as put-together as she usually did—until she passed me, and I saw her from behind.

“Oh dear,” I gasped, a hand flying up to cover my mouth in surprise. Jessa raised her eyebrows, and Kate whirled on me, her face suddenly pink with embarrassment.

“‘Oh dear,’ she says! ‘Oh dear!’” Kate yelled, throwing her arms up in the air dramatically. “I look like I sat on a severed head, and she says ‘Oh dear!’”

“It’s not that bad,” I corrected quickly, though the red blossoming of blood over the back of her white shorts was rather stark. I was reminded of the Rorschach inkblot test by the way it had seeped evenly in both directions, forming a pattern not unlike butterfly wings across the curve of her buttocks.

“It’s bad,” Kate said matter-of-factly. “I know it’s bad. I also know that I’m supposed to walk on stage in like five minutes.”

“It’s just rehearsal. You can miss it,” Jessa cut in, reaching out to rub across the back of Kate’s shoulders comfortingly. “We’ll go to the principal’s office and call your mom to come get you. Everyone will just think you’re sick. No biggie.”

“I wanted to watch Corinna’s practice speech!” Kate stomped her foot angrily and crossed her arms. “This isn’t fair. Stupid uterus!” She poked angrily at her abdomen, as though addressing the offending organ directly. “You
had
to choose today, this day of my fake-graduation!”

“Where’s Ricky?” Jessa asked, suddenly seeming to realize that our fourth was nowhere in sight.

“She said she was going to save me and then ran off!” Kate wailed, storming back into a stall and slamming it behind her. “She left me!”

“I’m sure she just went to get tampons,” I said soothingly. “Or Tide-To-Go. Maybe the blood will come out?”

“It won’t come out! That white dress
you
bled all over couldn’t be saved!” Kate opened the stall door again and poked her nose around it, looking apologetic. “I still don’t blame you for that. That step is a death trap.”

“Well, I guess we’re doomed to sit in here the whole rehearsal,” Jessa sighed, examining her fingernails. “Your name has probably already been called. Why’d you have to be a Barrett instead of a Williams or something?”

“Blame my mother for that one,” Kate groaned through the stall wall. I heard her plunk down on the closed toilet seat in resignation. “She’s the one who picked our fathers. Adams and Barrett, alphabet-starters.”

“At least she didn’t keep going and marry a Carter,” I joked, but it fell flat.

Jessa rolled her eyes toward me, pursed her lips, and then raised both her eyebrows in high arches, as if to say, “Really?”

“Yes, thank God my mother gave up on the institution of marriage after two failed attempts and instead became a total ho. Thank God I don’t have a whole alphabet of half siblings. Thank God I alone have to deal with her since Dustin moved out!”

I winced. Kate’s emotional state was on the rocks as it was, and we certainly weren’t helping. “I didn’t mean—”

Luckily, I was saved from stopping Kate’s meltdown by the reappearance of Ricky, who ran in with a pile of clothes in her arms. “I grabbed everything I could carry,” she panted, dumping her load on the counter between the sinks.

“From where?” I asked, eyeing the clothes suspiciously. The pile smelled a little
off
, even from a distance, and most of the clothes looked as if they belonged either to small children or to very large men.

“Lost-and-Found,” Ricky said, laughing as she picked through the pile anxiously. “Kate, get out here and choose something. Anything is better than what you have on now.”

Kate came out of the stall, looked at the pile of limp, vaguely strange-smelling clothes, and shook her head definitively. “No way.”

“Come on,” I said, seeing the ingenuity of Ricky’s plan. “We’ll find something you can wear in here.”

I began to help Ricky sort through the clothes, pushing aside tops and sweaters that had accidently come along for the ride when Ricky had grabbed as many bottoms as possible. There were several pairs of men’s jeans that Kate would drown in, damp-smelling gym shorts that went straight to the “no” pile, silk boxers covered in Bart Simpsons, and other unmentionables I couldn’t bring myself to touch, even just to move aside.

“This is disgusting,” Kate said, crossing her arms. “I’m not wearing used clothes.
Unwashed
used clothes. Dear God.”

“They really should wash these,” I agreed, skin crawling from having touched anything from the pile. I moved over to the only sink not filled with lost-and-found items and began casually washing my hands, trying not to appear frantic. “Some of those jeans might be okay?”

Kate raised an eyebrow and plucked a pair of nondescript jeans from the counter, holding them up to her waist emphatically. They, like every other pair on the table, looked about a half dozen sizes too big. No girl Kate’s size would
lose
a pair of jeans. Especially not a nice pair.

“Are there any belts?” Jessa said, mostly joking, but Ricky began to check under the remaining clothes for one, just in case.

“I didn’t see any, but—”

“It’s useless. You guys go to the rehearsal. I’ll just… go to the office and call my mom. Maybe the secretary won’t even laugh at my predicament.”

I doubted it, but I kept my lips pressed tightly together. The school secretarial staff was known for being extremely unsympathetic.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Jessa said, grabbing a thin floral sweater from the pile, one that looked both clean and fairly new. “Wear this.”

“It’s not going to be long enough to cover—” Kate began to protest, but Jessa was already shaking her head and motioning to Kate’s waist.

“Tie it around your waist like this,” she interrupted, demonstrating on herself by quickly turning the long sleeves into a bow at the front of her own hips. The body of the sweater hung down far enough to cover Jessa’s butt when she spun around. “Like you brought it but don’t want to go hang it up in your locker.”

Jessa untied the sweater from around her waist and handed it off to Kate, who mimicked Jessa’s demonstration. I’d seen it done time and again by kids who were made to wear sweaters by overbearing parents when it was not cold enough to need one. In fact, we had been guilty of doing the same when we were kids—but the practice fell out of use in high school for the bulk it added around your hips, or perhaps the air of unpreparedness it exuded.

Kate spun around to examine her posterior in the mirror, tugging on the sweater to make sure it completely hid the mess of her white shorts. “It’ll have to do….” She sighed, and Jessa clapped her hands suddenly.

“Corinna, you need to be onstage! Let’s go!”

“To fake-graduation!” Kate whooped as the four of us ran down the empty halls toward the auditorium, flying past a startled freshman at the water fountain in our rush.

We snuck into the back of the auditorium, panting, only to see the mass of seniors not sitting quietly in the audience but huddled around the stage
en masse
while each seat was assigned alphabetically. They were starting on the Ds, but there was an open seat beside Olivia Bateman that was clearly meant for Kate.

Taking a deep breath, she held the back of the sweater to her butt as she scooted around people’s knees to get to her spot halfway down the row. Even with the stain so close to their faces, no one in the row seemed to notice that Kate had so suddenly and so disastrously gotten her period, and I let out the breath I’d held tight in my chest as she plopped down next to Olivia as if nothing had happened.

“Corinna Nguyen!” someone hissed, horribly mispronouncing my last name, and I followed the voice around the back of the mass of bored students to see Vice Principal Redding waving me forward. “Where were you? You have to sit up front with the other speakers!” Redding’s hair was a frazzled mess of blonde curls sticking up every which way, as though she’d been running her hands through it impulsively. This was not an uncommon look for her.

“Bathroom. It was an emergency,” I tried to explain, but she was already giving me the rundown of all the instructions I’d missed and leading me to a seat in the front row, where I’d have easy access to the stage door on the left.

I spared a glance three rows back to meet Kate’s eyes. She shot me two thumbs-up and a brilliant white smile. When we’d all been seated properly, we began the mock ceremony, moving onto the stage in lines to receive tubes of blank paper that the other prefects and I had spent three days rolling and tying bright ribbons around, each a different shade of our school colors. We’d be receiving these fakes on the real day as well, and our diplomas would be mailed to us in thick envelopes to protect them from damage.

After we’d each been given a roll of paper, I stood up in front of a sea of my classmates and told them approximately what I’d be saying on the day of—leaving out large portions of my speech for time and to leave something for the actual ceremony. As I made my closing remarks, I found each of my friends in the audience, since without the stage lights on I could clearly make out each of their faces: Kate, with the Bs, watching me attentively; Jessa, several rows behind her in the Fs, smiling encouragingly with her hands folded neatly in her lap; and Ricky, nervously chewing her lips much closer to the back of the room, where I would have been sitting on her left if I’d been sorted alphabetically with the rest.

The pomp and circumstance of the whole thing was both irritating and exciting. A ball of nervous energy settled itself under my ribcage, and a countdown started in my head: nine days until graduation. Nine more days, and we’d walk across that stage for real, for the last time.

“I
WANT
to go home,” I croaked, my throat tightening with tears again. How could I walk across that stage knowing that my best friends would never be able to do the same? How could I make my
speech
without them there to hear it? “I want to go home right now.”

“In a little while,” the police officer with the notebook said. “We’re not done here yet.”

“Yes, we are,” I said decisively, shrugging off my father’s grip with some difficulty. I scrambled out of the bed, feeling wild and reckless. “We are done. I don’t know anything.” I felt shaky once I was standing on my own two feet again, but sitting back down on the bed would be like admitting defeat. “I don’t know anything else, so why don’t you go do your
jobs
and find the man who
murdered my friends
!”

I was on the edge of total hysteria, feeling it build and well inside me, ready to spill over at any provocation. Tears were running down my face and my nose itched fiercely, but I could not and would not lie down any longer. “I need to go home
now
.”

I stumbled a little as I took my first steps, and the officer standing by the curtain lunged at me and grabbed my arm. “You can’t go anywhere,” he said. He didn’t let go of my arm after steadying me, instead gripping tighter.

“Let go of my daughter!” my mother said angrily, glaring down the officer with her best stink-eye. Standing at five feet four inches tall without heels on, my mother somehow managed to become an intimidating pillar just by standing up. Her jaw was set in a hard line, and even the single teardrop balanced at the end of her long English nose wobbled menacingly.

“She’s wearing evidence!” the officer protested, but his fingers loosened around my bicep. I yanked my arm free and took a step back, closer to my mother, for whom a feeling of intense admiration had begun to form and swell like pride.

My mother glanced at me and pursed her lips. Her eyes, still wet with surprised tears, swept up and down over the dried blood on my dress and tights, scrutinizing the evidence of the crime left on her daughter.

Turning back to the police officer she said, “Honey, why don’t you run over to the gift shop and get Corinna something to change into so we can be on our way?” The too-sweet, forced civility was directed toward my silent father, though she didn’t break eye contact with the officer who’d put his hands on me. My father nodded and walked brusquely around the curtain separating my bed from the rest of the room.