Panic

by Lauren Oliver

Page 25

 

  Heather stared. “Since when?”

  “Does it matter?” Bishop looked annoyed. “Look, it was never a real thing, okay?”

  “You just liked hooking up with her,” Heather said. She suddenly felt angry, and cold, and exposed. She sat up, tugging down her shirt. Bishop was leaving her behind. He would find new girls—pretty, tiny girls like Avery—and he would forget all about her. It happened all the time.

  “Hey. ” Bishop sat up too. Heather wouldn’t look at him, so he reached out and forced her chin in his direction. “I’m trying to talk to you, okay? I . . . I had to break up with Avery. I like . . . someone else. There’s someone else. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But it’s complicated. …”

  He was staring at her so intensely; Heather could feel the warmth between them.

  She didn’t think. She just leaned in and closed her eyes and kissed him.

  It was like taking a bite of ice cream that’s been sitting out just long enough: sweet, easy, perfect. She wasn’t worried about whether she was doing it right, as she had been all those years ago in the movie theater, when she could only think of the popcorn in her teeth. She was simply there, inhaling the smell of him, of his lips, while the music thudded softly in the background and the cicadas swelled an accompaniment. Heather felt little bursts of happiness in her chest, as though someone had set off sparklers there.

  Then, abruptly, he pulled away. “Wait,” he said. “Wait. ”

  And instantly, the sparklers in her chest were extinguished, leaving only a smoking black place. Just that one word, and she knew: she’d made a mistake.

  “I can’t . . . ” Suddenly he looked different—older, full of regret, like someone she barely knew. “I don’t want to lie to you, Heather. ”

  She felt like she’d swallowed something spoiled: there was a bad taste in her mouth, and her stomach was lashing. She felt her face begin to burn. It wasn’t her. He was in love with someone else. And she’d just shoved her tongue down his throat like a lunatic.

  She had to crab-walk backward, away from him, to the edge of the trampoline. “Stupid,” she said. “It was stupid. Just forget it, okay? I don’t know what I was thinking. ”

  For a second, he looked hurt. But she was too embarrassed to care. And then he frowned, and he just looked tired and a little irritated, like she was an unruly child and he was a patient father. She realized suddenly that that was how Bishop saw her: like a kid. A kid sister.

  “Will you just sit down?” he said in his tired-dad voice. His hair was sticking straight up—the hair equivalent of a scream.

  “It’s getting late,” Heather said, which it wasn’t. “I have to take Lily home. Mom will get worried. ” Lie on top of lie. She didn’t know why she said it. Maybe because in that moment she really wished for it—wished that she was heading back to a real home with a normal mom who cared, instead of back to the car and the parking spot on Meth Row. Wished that she was small and delicate, like a special Christmas ornament that needed to be handled correctly. Wished that she was someone else.

  “Heather, please,” he said.

  The world was breaking up, shattering into colors—and she knew if she didn’t get out of there, she would start to cry. “Forget about it,” she said. “Seriously. Would you? Just forget it ever happened. ”

  She only made it a few steps away before the tears started. She swiped them away quickly with the heel of a hand; she had to pass through a dozen old classmates to get to the house, including Matt’s best friend, and she would rather die than be the girl crying at her best friend’s birthday party. Everyone would probably think she was wasted. Funny how people could be around you for so many years, and be so off the mark.

  She went in through the back door, taking a second inside to stand, inhaling, trying to get control of herself. Weirdly, although Bishop’s whole property was a junkyard, the house was clean, sparsely furnished, and always smelled like carpet cleaner. Heather knew that Mr. Marks’s longtime girlfriend, Carol, considered the yard a lost cause. But the home was her place, and she was always scrubbing and straightening and yelling at Bishop to take his dirty feet off the coffee table, for God’s sake. Even though the house hadn’t been remodeled since the seventies, and still sported shag carpet and weird orange-and-white-checkered linoleum in the kitchen, it looked spotless.

  Heather’s throat tightened again. Everything was so familiar here: the Formica dining room table; the crack running along the kitchen countertop; the curled photographs stuck to the fridge with magnets advertising dentists’ offices and hardware stores. They were as familiar to her as any she had ever called her own.

  They were hers, and Bishop had been hers, once.

  But no more.

  She could hear running water, and muffled TV sounds from the den, where Lily was watching. She stepped into the darkened hall and noticed the bathroom door was partly open. A wedge of light lay thickly on the carpet. Now she could hear crying, over the sound of the water. She saw a curtain of dark hair appear and disappear quickly.

  “Nat?” Heather swung the door open carefully.

  Water gushed from the faucet, and steam was drumming up from the porcelain bowl. The water must have been scalding, but Nat was still scrubbing her hands, and sniffling. Her skin was raw and red and shiny, like it had been burned.

  “Hey. ” Heather forgot, for the moment, about her own problems. She took a step into the bathroom. Instinctively, she reached out and shut off the faucet. Even the taps were hot. “Hey. Are you okay?”

  It was a stupid thing to say. Nat was obviously not okay.

  She turned to Heather. Her eyes were puffy, and her whole face looked weird and swollen, like bread that was rising wrong. “It’s not working anymore,” she said in a whisper.

  “What isn’t?” Heather asked. She felt suddenly on hyperalert. She noticed the drip-drip-drip of the faucet, and Nat’s monstrously red hands, hanging like deflated balloons by her side. She thought of the way that Nat always liked things even, straight down the middle. How sometimes she showered more than once a day. The taps and tongue clicks. Stuff she’d mostly ignored, because she was so used to it. Another blind spot between people.

  “That’s why I froze on the highway, you know,” Nat went on. “I just . . . glitched. ” Her eyes were watery again. “Nothing’s working. ” Her voice wavered. “I don’t feel safe, you know?”

  “Come here,” Heather said. She drew Nat into a hug and Nat continued crying, drunk, against her chest. She gripped Heather tightly as if she worried she might fall. “Shhh,” Heather murmured, again and again. “Shhh. It’s your birthday. ”

  But she didn’t say it would be okay. How could she? She knew that Nat was right.

  None of them was safe.

  No more. Never again.

  dodge

  DODGE HEARD VOICES IN THE LIVING ROOM AS SOON as he opened the door and immediately regretted coming home directly. It was just after eleven, and his first thought was that Ricky was over again. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with Ricky grinning like an idiot and Dayna blushing and trying to make things not awkward and all the time shooting Dodge dagger eyes, like he was the one intruding.

  But then his mom called, “Come in here, Dodge!”

  A man was sitting on the couch. His hair was graying, and he was wearing a rumpled suit, which matched his rumpled face.

  “What?” Dodge said, barely looking at his mom. He didn’t even try to be polite. He wasn’t going to play nice with one of his mom’s dates.

  His mom frowned.

  “Dodge,” she said, drawing out his name, like a warning bell. “You know Bill Kelly, don’t you? Bill came over for a little bit of company. ” She was watching Dodge closely, and he read a dozen messages in her eyes at once: Bill Kelly just lost his son, so if you’re rude to him, I swear you’ll be sleeping on the streets. …

  Dodge felt suddenly like his whole body was made of angles and spikes
, and he couldn’t remember how to move it correctly. He turned jerkily to the man on the couch: Big Bill Kelly. Now he could see the resemblance to his son. The straw-colored hair running, in the father’s case, to gray; the piercing blue eyes and the heavy jaw.

  “Hi,” Dodge said. His voice was a croak. He cleared his throat. “I was—am—I mean, we’re all sorry to hear—”

  “Thank you, son. ” Mr. Kelly’s voice was surprisingly clear. Dodge was glad he’d been interrupted, because he didn’t know what else he would have said. He was so hot he felt like his face was about to explode. He had the sudden, hysterical impulse to shout out: I was there. I was there when your son died. I could have saved him.

  He took a deep breath. The game was wearing on him. He was starting to crack.

  After what seemed like forever, Mr. Kelly’s eyes passed away from Dodge, back to his mother. “I should go, Sheila. ” He stood up slowly. He was so tall he nearly grazed the ceiling with his head. “I’m going to Albany tomorrow. Autopsy’s done. I don’t expect any surprises, but . . . ” He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “I want to know everything. I will know everything. ”

  Sweat was pricking up underneath Dodge’s collar. It might have been his imagination, but he was sure Mr. Kelly’s words were directed at him. He thought of all the Panic betting slips he’d been collecting this summer. Where were they? Had he put them in his underwear drawer? Or left them out on his bedside table? Jesus. He had to get rid of them.

  “Of course. ” Dodge’s mom stood too. Now all three of them were standing, awkwardly, like they were in a play and had forgotten their lines. “Say good night to Mr. Kelly, Dodge. ”

  Dodge coughed. “Yeah. Sure. Look, I’m sorry again—”

  Mr. Kelly stuck out his hand. “God’s works,” he said quietly. But Dodge felt that when Mr. Kelly shook his hand, he squeezed just a little too hard.

  That was the night Diggin went to a party down at the gully and ended up with a cracked rib, two black eyes, and one of his teeth knocked out. Derek Klieg was drunk; that was the excuse he gave afterward, but everyone knew it was deeper than that, and once the swelling in Diggin’s face went down, he told anyone who would listen how Derek had jumped him, threatened him, tried to get him to cough up the names and identities of the judges, and wouldn’t listen when Diggin insisted he didn’t know.

  It was an obvious violation of one of Panic’s many unspoken rules. The announcer was off-limits. So were the judges.

  Derek Klieg was immediately disqualified. He had forfeited his spot in the game, and his name was struck from the betting slips by morning.

  And Natalie, the last player eliminated, was back on.

  SATURDAY, JULY 30

  heather

  HEATHER WAS WOKEN BY SOMEONE RAPPING ON THE window. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, startled and momentarily disoriented. Sun was streaming through the windows of the Taurus. Dodge was watching her through the windshield.

  Now that she was awake, everything came into sudden focus: the kiss with Bishop and its botched end; Natalie crying in the bathroom; and now Dodge watching her, taking in the rumpled sheet and beaten-up cups from Dairy Queen in the passenger seat, the chip bags and the flip-flops and the scattered clothing in the backseat.