Uncertainty (9 page)

"What are you doing?" Jenna asked, as I slid the door shut in answer.

I stepped up on the supports and jumped the fence, a little trick Theo and I had both learned a long time ago. Crossing the lawn, I greeted her.

"Hello, stranger, how are you?" I asked, but my question was answered just upon looking at her. Her face was haggard, brown roots showing at the base of her ruby hair. Her bright green eyes were bloodshot, her mouth turned down in an irritated scowl.

"Not so well," she said glumly. A couple of thick paintbrushes were clenched in her fist, their bristles chunky with paint. She wrestled with the garden hose, then turned it on and started spraying the paint out.

"Where have you been the last couple of weeks?" I asked. I'd never, ever seen Theo like this. She was usually bubbly and put together, and while she had a tendency to be shy with strangers, it didn't last long once you got her talking. "Have you been working on the mural this whole time?"

"Yeah. I'm really sorry about that, Ariel. I just can't get it right." Paint was smudged on both arms, a yellow swipe across her forehead and off into her hair.

I had so many things I wanted to tell her, and yet I didn't feel like I could say any of them. Like I had a box full of secrets that would disappear if I opened it.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" I offered, knowing probably not. My art skills were nonexistent, and I sensed that she was like Hugh — she couldn't work with people watching.

Theo shook her head, shutting off the hose and shaking the brushes vigorously to get out the colored drops of water. "I just want to get this over with. And I have to work alone. It's just the way I am."

"I figured as much."

"I promise we'll make up for lost time. After."

"Don't worry about that," I said. "Just do your thing. I'll be here when you get out of purgatory."

The corner of her mouth quirked for just a second. Then she was retreated back into her house, and the door slammed behind her. Clothes fluttered on the laundry line, sheets and blankets and towels. I wondered if Ms. Vore was teaching summer school. It was all so mundane that it threw me for a loop.

Jenna was standing in the dining room when I went back in, looking at me in confusion.

"What was that?" she quizzed me.

"Nothing you have to worry about," I assured her, echoing what I'd told Theo.

I heard Hugh coming down the stairs. He was on the phone, or talking to himself. For some reason I didn't even know, I hid myself behind the kitchen cupboards.

"Are you a spy now, too?" Jenna asked in amused annoyance.

"Shhh!" I said with my finger to my lips, even though he couldn't hear her. She was distracting.

"It's moving too fast," I heard Hugh say to the person on the phone. "Much faster than I expected. It's like he was planning it all long, before he got here."

A pause, while the other person was talking.

"That's what I think, too," Hugh said. I heard him come close to the kitchen, and I scrunched up against the cupboards. "It wouldn't have been hard to communicate online, text messaging. It opens everything up."

He got closer. I heard him rifling through the mail on the table.

"I can meet up after Claire gets home. I'll just tell her I need to pick up something at the store," Hugh said. It made my blood run chilly. He never lied to my mom.

He must have retrieved whatever he needed, because his footsteps became fainter as he went back upstairs. I peered around the cupboards, staring after him.

Jenna and I were laying on the basement floor, facing in opposite directions, staring at the ceiling. Beneath us lay the faded oriental rug that had come from my grandma Eleanor's living room. I ran my hand over the red and black beasts and swirling flowers, lined with gold.

It was Saturday. My parents were having a movie date night. I had opted out, not that they had asked me. Since I wasn't stirring the waters, I had mostly retreated into the background.

I was glad for the chill of the basement floor. It hadn't dropped from the nineties during the day, and even in the nighttime it hadn't dipped below seventy. "An unprecedented heat wave" the cheerful weatherman had called it. I called it a sweat fest.

Even though we were separated by a foot, I could feel a faint electric thrumming emanating from her. That didn't even seem strange anymore. It was amazing what you could get used to.

Another explosion set off the surround sound speakers and shook the floor.

"What the gods are they watching up there?" Jenna asked, pointing her fingers like a gun at the ceiling.

"Something with explosions instead of plot."

"That doesn't seem like either of your parents' style. Was Masterpiece Theater a repeat?" Her hands were resting on her stomach, sloping down from gravity.

It felt weird to shrug while laying down. "They're entering midlife crisis time. They keep insisting we try new things."

In all the time that we'd spent together, we'd avoided any deep topics. Jenna had never been a politics in the middle east person, anyway. But it hadn't stopped me from thinking about things, especially when I laid down to sleep at night.

Last year, I'd found out that Jenna had been hanging out with Lainey and her cronies behind my back. It jived with the fact that Jenna had begun to pull away from me in the months before her disappearance. She had started to go out partying, something we were never big on.

"Answer me this," I said.

"Shoot."

I rested my own hands against my stomach, mimicking her posture. I was careful not to touch her in case one of those shocks happened again. I didn't know if it would happen for sure, but I didn't want to chance it.

"Did you hang out with Lainey and Madison and not tell me about it?"

The silence that followed told me she was caught. I was surprised at how jealous it still made me feel, the old wound instantly splitting fresh.

I sat up and looked at her unmistakably guilty face. Her necklace had fallen back into her hair. Her mouth opened and shut several times. Rinse and repeat.

"How did you know about that?" she asked quietly, caught in her own web.

"So it is true?" I asked. I had known it was, of course — Theo had been the one to tell me, and she was the most honest person I'd ever met. I just wanted to hear Jenna admit it.

"Yeah." She pulled a strand of hair through her teeth.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you would have shunned me," Jenna said. Her eyes flicked to my face, searching my emotions. "Don't tell me you wouldn't, because it's completely true. I know you better than your own hand, Ariel Rose Donovan."

"Would you blame me?" I asked, still feeling the burn of jealousy, though it was fading. Film machine gun fire erupted above. "Why would you ever hang out with those vipers? We've hated them since first grade. Was it about being popular?"

"I never cared about that. I still don't. My mom...thought it would be a good idea," she said carefully. As if timed for us, another boom from the TV rumbled above.

"Since when do you do anything Rachel says?" I questioned. "You normally run in the opposite direction as a rule."

"Well, yeah, normally," Jenna admitted. "But it seemed so important to her."

"Why?" I had waited so long for any answers, and didn't think I'd ever get any. I had built up a reserve of questions.

"Mom was talking about joining that stupid Thornhill Society," Jenna said. "And she said it would help if I got in good with Lainey, because her dad is like one of their bigwigs. And she and dad had been fighting so much over money..."

That made no sense. It made me think of McPherson's timely induction. Thornhill members were supposed to be the wealthy people in town, not the regular schlubs like Jenna's parents.

"Why would they even consider your family?" I asked bluntly.

"Maybe they needed more butt-kissers."

I let the subject drop for now.

"When you and Lainey were together, did you guys talk about me?" I asked lamely. I shut my eyes. I wanted to know, but at the same time didn't.

"No, dork," Jenna said, chuckling warmly and sitting up on her elbows. "We mostly talked about the Winter collections in Vogue and shoes. I was trying to weasel a free tanning membership out of her. Nothing important."

But I didn't know if I could fully believe her. I never would have thought she could lie to me before. Now I didn't know.

As if reading my thoughts, Jenna said, "You know I wouldn't lie to you about anything important, right? It was just a little white lie, I knew it wouldn't hurt anything." Never mind that it had hurt our friendship.

"I just have a lot of questions. Your mom said something about emails, too, ones she wouldn't let me see. Ones that suggested that you ran away, that you'd been planning it."

This revelation made her shoot up on her feet. I looked up at her in disbelief. "She was snooping around in my emails? What the hell?"

"That's what she said."

"Even if she was, there was nothing there. I never even gave Madison or Lainey my email, they just texted me a few times. I wasn't going to run away, I mean where would I go on my allowance?"

I nodded, trying to believe her.

Suddenly a big boom sounded from upstairs, much louder than anything before.

"That wasn't from the movie," I said, frowning. We both ran upstairs.

Hugh and Claire were standing by the sliding glass door. At least, they were standing where the door had been. Broken glass had shattered all over the floor. I moved over near them to get a closer look. Behind us, their movie was still blaring, forgotten.

A huge crow had flown into the door, its body a twisted mess of black, bloody feathers. Blood oozed in between the glass shards. Some of the feathers were still floating down in the horribly still air.

Later on, when Hugh had finished sweeping the glass into a dustpan, Claire and I were sitting at the kitchen table over coffee. Claire's white knuckles clutched her mug, the undiluted coffee shaking inside.

I normally didn't drink coffee, not liking the bitter taste. Especially ever since the gallon I had downed after Warwick was arrested. But I took a swig of the liquid from my own cup. It warmed my insides on the way down.

"I don't know how that could have happened," Claire murmured. Hugh was busy tacking up a plastic sheet in the empty hole where the door had been.

"It just means the window was really clean," I said, trying for a joke. It sounded inappropriate. I wanted to comfort her, but when she got like this, it mostly just freaked me out. I didn't know how to react when the roles were reversed and I was the one taking care of her.

Jenna wouldn't stop bugging me about the emails. A repairman came in the next day to measure the door and decide the best way to fix it. Claire made herself busy in the exercise room Hugh and I had set up for her a long time ago, that she'd rarely used up until now.

"I'm telling you, check my inbox," Jenna persisted. I was still trying to pretend I was talking to no one as we sat on the couch together, watching the installer and his yellow tape measure.

Claire's office was empty. I went in, feeling like I was being sneaky even though I was allowed to use the computer during the summer without asking.

The room was dark, from a lack of windows, the only light the blue indicators on the monitor and computer tower. I swung the mouse so that the monitor blinked to life and sat down, Jenna crouching beside me.

"Of course she would invade my privacy," Jenna was complaining as I navigated to the sign in page. "Not like she has anything better to do."

"I don't know, if my kid went missing, I'd probably cross all the lines, too," I mumbled. She ignored me.

"You know how she's always going through my room. She says she's putting away laundry, but it's like, socks don't go underneath the mattress, mom," Jenna ranted.

"Well, maybe if she didn't find things like cigarettes and random dude's phone numbers..." I said with a sideways grin, remembering.

"Those cigarettes lasted me four mouths!" Jenna said defensively. "You know they were just a prop."

I remembered every time Rachel caught her up to trouble, it had seemed like the end of the world. Jenna's privileges would get stripped for a few days, then her parents would reverse the decision like nothing had ever happened. Flip-flop parenting, Jenna called it.

"What's your password?" I asked, fingers poised over the ergonomic keyboard.

She looked at me sheepishly. "Uh, Twinklebug22." I had the feeling she should be blushing.

"One or two g's on that?"

"One. It was my dad's nickname —"

"I remember," I said, cutting her off.

We both sat and waited for the page to load, watching the screen impatiently.

"Wow...is that all spam or what?" Jenna asked. "When did I become so popular?"

There were 2000 unread messages in the inbox. It looked like many of them were alerts from her fanpage. I moved the scroll bar uselessly up and down, a little lost for a minute as to how to proceed.