Sloth

by Robin Wasserman

  “Sounds good,” Miranda said, waiting for some kind of explosion.

  Harper pulled out a tube of cherry-colored lipstick.

  “Nice color,” Miranda told her. “New?”

  “Yeah. Want to try?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked in the mirror, giving her limp hair a disdainful flip. Cherry and orange didn’t seem like a match made in heaven. “Think it would look good on me?”

  Harper tossed over the tube, then raised her eyebrows and gave Miranda a weak half smile. “Totally.”

  chapter

  _______________

  4

  It wasn’t easy to surprise Kane Geary When you assume that everyone in the world is out for themselves, not much happens that you don’t see coming.

  But this was most definitely unexpected.

  Beth sat at a table just in front of the school doors, handing out Haven High pennants and wrist bands to any seniors who’d forgotten to dress in Haven’s school colors— rust and mud—for Spirit Day; the most festively adorned, psychotically spirited senior would win some kind of fabulous grand prize.

  Kane wore a navy button-down shirt and Michael Kors jeans.

  He didn’t do spirit.

  Harper was a few feet ahead of him, walking quickly with her head down, taking a few final puffs on her cigarette before entering the school. Kane, who noticed everything, caught Beth looking away as she approached—no surprise there. Harper, on the other hand, barely noticed the table of paraphernalia or the blond beauty staffing it. She just took one last drag and carelessly flicked the cigarette away—too carelessly, it turned out, as it tumbled through the air, right into Ms. Barbini’s back.

  Never a good idea to pelt the teachers with cigarettes— tempting as it often was—but Ms. Barbini, the no-nonsense, no-deodorant geometry teacher, was a particularly poor choice. She whirled around, bent down, and picked up the incriminating butt between her thumb and index finger, then glared at Harper, who had frozen in place.

  “Who threw this?” she asked, in a tone that suggested she need not wait for an answer.

  Kane was close enough to see Harper roll her eyes, open her mouth . . . and snap it shut again as Beth leaped to her feet.

  “I did, Ms. Barbini,” she announced.

  Surprise.

  Kane and Ms. Barbini goggled at her; Harper’s face remained expressionless, as if she were watching a rather boring show on TV and was just waiting for a commercial.

  “You?” the teacher said incredulously.

  “Me.”

  “Can I go now?” Harper asked. “Wouldn’t want to be late for homeroom.” She shot a hostile glare at Beth—a silent message that looked less like thank you and more like your choice, your funeral—and, without waiting for an answer, limped up the stairs and disappeared inside the school.

  “I’m very disappointed in you, Ms. Manning. Smoking on school grounds?” The teacher whipped out a small pink pad and began to scribble. “That’s two days’ detention.” She thrust the detention slip at Beth and, after giving her a disdainful scowl, followed in Harper’s footsteps up the stairs and through the heavy wooden doors.

  It had been a late night, and Kane had almost cut homeroom to sleep in—good thing he’d made the “responsible” choice, as nothing cured a hangover like a good mystery. And there was nothing more mysterious than Beth taking the fall for her mortal enemy.

  “Now that was interesting,” he said, sauntering up to Beth’s table. He swept aside a swath of orange and brown crap and hopped on, half standing, half sitting, and all in Beth’s face.

  “Good morning,” she chirped, her face a gruesome imitation of a smile. “Would you like a pennant?”

  “I’d like to know if you’re lobbying for sainthood.”

  The smile collapsed into a frown—this one looked real. “Get off of there.” A pause. “Please.”

  “She’s not going to thank you,” Kane pointed out. “But you know that. And you’ve got no reason to want to help her, unless maybe you just feel sorry for her . . . but even the kind and generous Beth Manning wouldn’t go that far.” He leaned toward her, squinting as if to peer more deeply into her eyes and uncover the real motive.

  “Can you just leave me alone?” Beth snapped. Her face was turning pale, and she looked nervously down at the stack of papers she was shuffling and reshuffling as she spoke.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you owed her in some way,” Kane mused. “But what could you possibly owe Harper?”

  At first, he’d just been enjoying himself watching her squirm—but Kane was beginning to suspect that his instincts were right, and something really was going on here. And it turned out that, accompanying his natural curiosity was an uncharacteristically sincere urge to protect Harper from whatever it might be. The second surprise of the morning.

  “Just drop it,” she pleaded in a choked voice. “Just go away.”

  “Where’s all this hostility coming from?” He gave her a wounded look. “I thought we were supposed to be friends now—isn’t that what you said?”

  “Forget what I—”

  “Is this jerk bothering you?”

  Ah, the knight in shining armor, Kane thought, without turning around. Just in time.

  “Chill out, buddy,” he told Adam. “Your ex and I are just having a little chat.” Kane stopped, and then, laughing as if the thought had just occurred to him, continued, “I guess she’s my ex too. Share and share alike.”

  “Get out of here, Kane.” Adam grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and pulled him off the table. Kane wrestled his arm away, but that was it. He didn’t leave; he also didn’t fight back. Adam was the one with the problem, Adam was the one with the grudge—Adam was the one who, despite an apology and plenty of time, refused to get over it. He liked to act the wounded party, but he was the one who’d called an official end to their friendship. Over a girl. Adam was the one who just couldn’t deal.

  “You okay, Beth?” he asked now, pulling that Mr. Sensitive act the girls couldn’t get enough of. (Except for Beth, Kane noted, with more than a flicker of pride— thanks in part to him, she’d had plenty.)

  “I don’t need you to protect me,” she snapped, rising from the table.

  “Can’t you both see that I’m busy?” she cried suddenly “I’m taking care of a million things, and the two of you . . .” She slammed down the cover of her thick binder and grabbed it off the table, hugging it to her chest.

  “Beth—”Adam smiled and held up his hands in supplication.

  “No. Not now. Just leave me alone. Both of you.” No one moved. “No? Fine, then I’ll do it for you.”

  She spun away, her blond hair whipping against Kane’s face, and walked off.

  Kane and Adam stared at each other, Adam looking like he’d just taken a swig of sour milk.

  “So,” he said finally, rubbing a hand against his close-cropped blond hair.

  “Yeah,” Kane agreed.

  “What did you—?”

  “Hey, nothing,” Kane protested quickly, shaking his head. “She’s just wound too tight.”

  “Ya think?” Adam laughed, sounding not particularly happy, but not particularly angry, either, which was a change. “I’m starting to think all girls are crazy. She ‘forgive’ you, too?”

  Kane nodded, and the two exchanged a wry smile, their first in weeks. “Wonder what she acts like when she holds a grudge.”

  Adam was waiting for his tutor in the “computer lab” (really a closet-size space with a couple of stone-age PCs) when Miranda wandered in.

  Great. Just great.

  He’d hoped to keep the whole humiliating tutor thing under wraps, but if Miranda got wind of it, surely she’d run straight to Harper—who, in her current mood, might spread it all over school.

  More good luck for me, he thought sourly.

  “Hey, Adam.” Miranda didn’t look particularly surprised to see him, just uncomfortable. “What’s up?”

  “Just waiting for
someone,” he said brusquely, hoping she’d take the hint and leave.

  And then the other shoe dropped—on his head.

  “Uh, yeah ... I know.” She gave him a tight smile, and the truth sunk in.

  ”You’re my tutor?”

  “Guilty.” Miranda rubbed the back of her neck and hovered in the doorway. “Look, if this is too weird for you or anything, I’m sure you could get them to assign you someone else—”

  “No, no,” he said without thinking, not wanting to be rude. But, on second thought . . . he’d known Miranda for years, and though they’d never been close, they’d always had one big thing in common: Harper.

  Maybe this wasn’t such bad luck after all.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” he told her, “and not some jerk who’d go bragging to the honor society about what an idiot I am.”

  Miranda set her stuff down and pulled up a chair. “You’re not an idiot,” she said firmly.

  Adam spit out a laugh. “I can see Campbell didn’t give you the full story. Trust me,” he boasted, clasping his hands together over his head like a champion, “you’re looking at the official winner of the Haven High dumbass award.”

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Miranda said, grinning. Adam was suddenly certain that she didn’t know he was on the verge of not graduating; he wasn’t about to fill her in.

  “So, where should we start?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess I’ve got a math test this week,” he mumbled. Most of his friends were in calc or pre-calc this year, but he was stuck taking basic algebra. It was really for juniors—and it was still way over his head.

  “Cool, I love math.” As the words slipped out, Miranda looked up, horrified. “You tell anyone I just said that and I’ll have to kill you.”

  “How about a deal?” he suggested. “You keep this whole tutoring thing to yourself and I won’t tell anyone that you’re secretly a total geek.”

  They grinned, and shook on it.

  That was the end of the fun—Miranda dove right into the work, struggling to explain to Adam how to apply the quadratic formula and what it meant when an equation had an imaginary solution. But he couldn’t focus, and not just because it all sounded like a foreign language.

  “How is she?” he asked suddenly, looking up from the books.

  Miranda didn’t even pretend to be confused. “She’s okay. . . .” She sighed. “That’s what she says, at least. I don’t ask anymore. It’s just . . . it’s better that way, you know?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t know, of course. But he knew Harper, so he could imagine.

  “Have you talked to her? I mean, have you two been ... ?”

  “You don’t know?” Adam wrinkled his forehead. “I thought girls talked all that stuff to death.”

  “Well, lately . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said again. “Lately.” He wouldn’t make her say it. “She won’t talk to me,” he admitted. “I don’t know why.”

  But that was a lie, wasn’t it? He knew exactly why—he couldn’t accept it.

  She looks much better this time. Her skin is pink, her breathing strong and steady, the machines gone. And her eyes are open.

  For two days, she refused to see anyone. And then, today, he was summoned.

  She waves weakly when he comes into the room. She doesn’t smile.

  ”You look good, kid,” he says. Comparatively, it is true.

  ”They say I’m going home tomorrow.”

  ”Great!” His smile feels fake. Hers is nonexistent.

  He comes over to the bed and leans over, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Harper,” he says softly. “I’m—”He doesn’t know how to talk about it, what it felt like to lie awake in bed worrying about her, not knowing, waiting for something to happen, desperately hoping it wouldn’t, but even more desperate for the weird, endless, torturous limbo of waiting to just end. One way or another. He doesn’t want to ask if she heard all the things he told her when her eyes were closed, because he’s afraid that she did—and afraid that she didn’t. “We were all really worried,” he says finally, hiding in the “we.”

  ”I didn’t think you’d come,” she says dully. “I thought you hated me. ”

  ”Of course I don’t hate you,” he says, his voice too jolly. She winces. He knows he’s trying too hard; he just doesn’t know what he’s trying to do. He pulls a familiar chair up to the bed. He doesn’t take her hand. “Look, things got all screwed up at the end there, and I ... we both said a lot of things that . . . you know, we probably shouldn’t have.”

  ”Mostly you said a lot of things,” she reminds him. “I just said I’m sorry. ”

  She’d said it over and over again; he hadn’t wanted to listen.

  ”I know. I know you are,” he tells her. “I get that now. And I forgive you. ”

  ”Really?” Her eyes widen. She tries to sit up in bed, and her face twists in pain. He touches her shoulder, gently, helping her to lie back. She reaches out, touches his face. “Everything I did, I just did it because—”

  ”I know.”

  The tension disappears from her face. “Then it’s okay,” she murmurs, almost to herself “Then at least something is . . .”

  He leans in closer, struggling to hear—and she kisses him.

  He jerks away.

  He does it without even thinking.

  He hasn’t thought any of it through, he realizes now. And now it’s too late.

  ”What?” There is a new pain on her face. “What is it?”

  ”Gracie, when I said—I didn’t mean—”

  ”You said you forgave me, Ad,” she says softly, as if maybe he forgot, and this is all a simple misunderstanding. “So that’s it. We can start again. No more lies, no more—”

  ”No.” He doesn’t know he’s going to say it before the word pops out, but he means it. “I want us to be friends again, Harper, I really do. But anything else . . . I think we work better, just as friends. When we tried to have more”—When you had to have more, he doesn’t say—”things got messy.”

  ”But it was all a mistake!” she protests, her voice scratchy and weak. “I explained that. I apologized, a million times. And you just want to go back? Like none of it ever happened? Like you never told me that you—”

  ”None of it was real.” He tries not to look away. He wants so much to make her smile; but he can’t tell her what she wants to hear. “When we were together, it was all a lie.” The words are harsh, but his voice is gentle. He doesn’t want to hurt her. “Everything you said was based on lies—and everything I said, that was just because I believed them. ”

  She sags back against the pillows, her face returning to the dull, expressionless mask she’d worn when he came in.

  Stop, he tells himself, horrified. Look what he’s said, what he’s done. He has to fix it—fix her.

  ”Gracie, you’re my best friend,” he says, and now he does take her hand. He can feel her pulling away, but he squeezes tighter, and she doesn’t have the strength. “I miss that. I miss you. We tried the whole dating thing, and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t matter why, or whose fault it is. It just didn’t. But that doesn’t mean—”

  ”Get out,” she says flatly.

  ”What?”

  “I don’t need this.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says, trying not to.

  ”You don’t forgive me,” she says bitterly. “You still think I’m not good enough for you, that I’m this manipulative slut who can’t be trusted. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That I’m this terrible person, all rotted on the inside?”

  ”But I was wrong,” he protests. “I didn’t mean it. ”

  ”Right. “ Her voice swells, and he realizes that even now, hurt, powerless, confined to a bed, she has power. She is still, after all, Harper Grace. “You meant it. Then. So what’s changed now? You see me lying here and you feel sorry for me? You figure poor little Harper needs a nice pick-me-up in her
bed of pain? And what? I’m supposed to be grateful for your pity?” Her voice is shaking, but her eyes are dry. And he knows that she will never let him see her pain.

  “It’s not pity,” he argues.

  ”Yeah, but it’s not—” She stops herself. There is a long silence. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says finally. “I’m fine. You did your little good deed by coming here, so you can forget your guilty conscience. ”

  It would be so easy to fix this, he thinks. All he has to do is take her back, tell her he loves her and he understands everything she did to him. Tell her he’s ready to start over again, that the past doesn’t matter.

  But it does matter. A car crash can’t erase anything that happened, or the choices that she made; it doesn’t change the kind of person she is, it doesn’t make it any easier to trust her again.

  ”You should get some rest,” he says. “We can talk about this tomorrow. I’ll come back and—”

  ”Don’t. ”

  “I want to. ”

  “I don’t care. “ She turns her head away from him and closes her eyes. They’re done.

  “She’s feeling a lot better,” Miranda said, shrugging. “I’m sure pretty soon everything else will be back to normal. And the two of you . . .”

  “I don’t know,” he said dubiously, although he had the same hope. It’s why he kept trying, in hopes that, if nothing else, she’d eventually get tired of pushing him away.

  “I could tell her you were asking,” Miranda offered.

  “No, don’t bother.” He looked down at his notebook, where a mess of numbers and letters sprinkled the page in an incomprehensible pattern. “Maybe we should just get back to work.”

  After all, nothing in his life made much sense anymore; at least when it came to algebra, there was an answer key in the back of the book.

  Beth pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, nudging the car just over the speed limit, and tried not to think about the two meetings she was blowing off or the stack of homework she’d face when she got home again. Today had gone from bad—an encounter with Kane that had rattled her even more than her first ever detention slip— to worse as she’d bombed a pop quiz, forgotten her gym uniform, and almost lost the Spirit Day prizes. She’d found them at the last minute, but had been forced to miss the culminating Spirit Rally in favor of her first detention, where she’d cowered in the back row under the glare of a tall, gaunt boy with pale skin and greasy hair who kept whispering something about how hot she’d look in leather.