Sloth

by Robin Wasserman

  “Maybe I don’t want to get out of it,” Harper snapped, opening the emergency exit door and slipping back inside the school. “Maybe I just want what I deserve.”

  Beth shoved her fist against her mouth to stifle a scream. Then she bit down, hard, tears springing to her eyes—not from the pain.

  Above her, she could hear Kane pacing back and forth on the landing, muttering to himself. She couldn’t make out his words, but then, it didn’t matter—she’d already heard enough. Beth tugged her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them tight, rocking back and forth, trying to drive the new knowledge out of her brain.

  She’d cut class for the first time ever, needing to be alone. Kane had shown her the spot, long ago. That day, they had lounged on the landing, kissing in the sun. Today she had slunk down the rickety stairs and retreated to the dank, narrow space below. She had pressed herself up against the concrete retention wall, closed her eyes, and hoped, just for a few minutes, to hide from her life.

  But the truth had found her.

  Harper had been driving the car.

  Harper had been drugged up, and Harper had gotten behind the wheel.

  Kaia was dead. And Beth was to blame. It was that simple.

  Not my fault, she’d insisted, over and over again. The mantra had been a wall between her and an ocean of terror and guilt.

  And now the wall had crumbled. And she was drowning. She couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but rock back and forth as two words battered her brain.

  My fault. My fault. My fault. Her lips moved, but no sound came out, not because she had no air left but because she was a coward. Kane was still up there. She could—should—stand up and scream out the truth about what she’d done, but the thought of moving made her dizzy. “Give yourself some time,” Kane had told Harper, and it was as if he’d been talking to Beth.

  And in a way, he had—he’d been talking to Kaia’s killer.

  Me.

  She needed to slow down; she needed to think.

  “Shit!” Kane’s voice. There was a loud clang, as if he’d kicked the railing. Then the door opened, closed. And she was alone.

  I killed her, Beth thought, testing the way the words sounded in her head. She almost laughed out loud; it sounded ridiculous. She’d never stolen anything, never gotten a speeding ticket, never been in a fight, still felt guilty when she lied to her parents. She was responsible, she was caring—she was good. And yet . . .

  She squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath, willing herself to wake up and discover that the last month had been a stupid nightmare, that the box of pills was still sitting on her nightstand and Kaia was still alive. She would do anything, give up anything, to go backward. Maybe, if she wished for it hard enough, if she made enough silent promises, she could open her eyes and be back in January None of this seemed real, anyway; maybe it wasn’t.

  She opened her eyes and she was still huddled on the ground, facing a blank wall. Nothing had changed.

  It didn’t matter what she’d meant to do, she told herself. All that mattered were the consequences.

  You say you’re a good person, she thought. Prove it.

  Beth stood up, hyperconscious of every breath as if, without constant monitoring, she might forget to take another one. She trudged up the stairs and opened the door, squeezing the handle so tightly that it left an angry red slash across her palm. Now what? She would have to find Harper, or maybe the principal—or maybe she should just go directly to the police. She didn’t know how these things worked, aside from the stray detail she’d picked up from Law & Order. Maybe she’d get to face off against Jesse Martin in the interrogation room. That wouldn’t be so bad. Or Chris Noth. Except he was kind of old and bloated these days, and—

  She almost burst into laughter again, and stopped herself just in time, fearing that once she started, she might never stop. She was losing it.

  “Hey, watch it!”

  Someone slammed past her as she stumbled blindly down the hall, and she suddenly realized that she was surrounded by people. The bell must have rung. She should be getting to her second-period class. She wouldn’t want to get in trouble for being late—

  The crazy laughter threatened to bubble up again, as she remembered herself. What was detention, compared to a jail sentence? What was facing down an angry teacher, compared to facing down the knowledge that she was a killer?

  “Beth! Thank God I found you—” A short girl with dirty blond hair grabbed her and pulled her over toward the wall, out of the stream of students. It took a moment for Beth to register her identity: Hilary, the perky vice-chair of the Senior Spirit committee. “Listen, we have to talk; the auction this afternoon’s going to be a total disaster if we don’t figure this stuff out.”

  “What?” Beth asked weakly, backing away.

  “The auction” Hilary repeated. “You missed the meeting yesterday, and we still need to get final approval on the list of participants and talk to Mr. Grady about—”

  “I really ... I really can’t deal with this right now,” Beth protested. “I’ve got to ... I can’t talk.”

  “Okay, okay, then let’s pick a time to meet.” Her words tumbled out at lightning speed, and Beth could barely follow her; or maybe Beth’s mind was staging a slowdown. “I can’t do third period because I have a test, but maybe I could get out of fourth if I got Grady to sign off on it or fifth period lunch—when are you free?”

  “I don’t . . .” Beth tried to battle her way through the fog and come up with something coherent to say. She had a test next period, she realized, and a project to present in the next, and at lunch she was supposed to be assigning articles for the next edition of the Gazette and then doing an extra credit project for chem lab, and—and she gasped. Because all of that was irrelevant now. If she walked down the hall and into the principal’s office and turned herself in, it wouldn’t matter that she’d skipped her calculus test or ditched a newspaper meeting. She felt like she was living out two lives, or worse, was split between two levels of reality, and one was about to consume the other. She was about to lose everything, and the weight of what she’d done and what she needed to do pressed down on her like a vise, squeezing her chest until it felt like her organs would mash together and it would all finally stop.

  “Beth? Are you okay? You look a little . . . pale.”

  The voice sounded like it was coming from a great distance. “I’m fine,” Beth said, and her own voice sounded even farther away. She tried to say something else, but she couldn’t breathe, much less speak. Hilary’s concerned face slowly faded out of view as her field of vision turned to white, then gray, like poor TV reception breaking the world down into a blank screen of scrambled light. Beth felt her control slipping away and, along with it, her panic.

  Maybe now I don’t have to decide what happens next, she thought as her knees buckled and Hilary caught her just before her head smacked against the linoleum floor. Someone somewhere was shouting and footsteps were pounding and Beth didn’t care about any of it anymore. She just closed her eyes and let it all fade away. Maybe this is the end.

  She might have made it out safely if her phone hadn’t rung. Harper had persevered through the morning and made it to lunch—largely because her mother had driven her to school and she didn’t have any way of getting home early that didn’t involve throwing herself on someone’s (read: Miranda’s) mercy. But class was torture, as was lunch, a silent staring contest between Miranda and Harper, ensconced across the room from their usual table—the better to avoid Kane—neither commenting on the change or on much of anything beyond that night’s history homework and the possibility of their gym teacher having another nervous breakdown.

  By the time the bell rang, Harper had resolved to get out, somehow. She didn’t want to drag Miranda along, as that would involve offering some kind of explanation— painful but true, or false but exhausting—and her leg still hurt too much to make the long walk home. But surely, if she coul
d just sneak off campus, she could find a nice, quiet place to hide and wait for the day to officially end. Thanks to the senior auction, the end would come more quickly than usual, and her mother wouldn’t think anything of it if Harper called home asking for an early pickup. (An even earlier pickup, courtesy of a never-fail headache-cramps-dizziness combo and a trip to the nurse’s office, had crossed her mind, but she’d quickly vetoed it. These days, her mother would just drag her straight to the doctor for excessive testing and monitoring, a fate worse than school, if such a thing were possible.)

  So she got rid of Miranda, tossed her uneaten lunch, and followed the crowd out of the cafeteria and down the hall, hoping to slip outside unnoticed. She had just stepped outside, smiling at the rush of cool air against her face, when her phone rang.

  Harper cursed, knowing she shouldn’t have turned it on after class, but she hadn’t been able to resist.

  Restricted number.

  She didn’t need caller ID to tell her it was Detective Wells—and if she just answered now and told the truth, all this would be over. But she couldn’t do it. She stopped walking and slouched against the wall, staring at the flashing red light on the top of her phone; part of her wanted to throw it against the concrete pavement as hard as she could and watch it shatter, as if that would be the end of anything.

  It was her own fault that she didn’t hear him coming.

  “Harper Grace? Is that you? What are you doing out here?”

  Mr. Grady was a round little man with a rapid-fire smile and a walrus mustache who’d never forgotten the glory days of his high school drama career and now never missed the chance for a performance, onstage or off. Harper avoided him whenever possible.

  She slipped the phone back into her bag, only half grateful that the decision, for the moment, had been made for her.

  “Good lord, Harper, whatever has come over you, you look pale as a ghost!” Mr. Grady boomed, his voice tinged with a vaguely British, entirely fake accent that he claimed to have picked up during his “time abroad.” (Harper and Miranda had always suspected he’d picked it up from one too many nights on the couch in front of Masterpiece Theatre.)

  “Just getting some air,” Harper said with a sigh, already resigned to her fate: school.

  “Good, good,” Mr. Grady said, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “Always best to energize yourself before a performance, I always say. Now, you’ll need a pass so you don’t get in trouble for being late.”

  “Uh ... performance?” She realized as soon as she said it that she should have just kept silent; he was already fumbling with a pad of hall passes, and she didn’t want to endanger her Get Out of Detention Free card by pointing out that he was possibly insane, certainly mistaken.

  “Well, perhaps not in the technical sense of the word,” Mr. Grady admitted, winking at her, “but I won’t tell if you won’t. After all, people like you and I know that any public appearance is a performance, don’t we?” He handed her the hall pass and then, before she could escape, placed a hand on her shoulder. “I have to admit, Harper, I’m surprised to see you getting back on the horse so quickly, after your rather ... unfortunate turn at the podium last month. And to put yourself out there in the service of your fellow students? Magnificent, young lady, simply magnificent!”

  At the thought of her “unfortunate turn,” Harper almost gagged; she remembered little more than the glare of the spotlight, the murmurs of the audience, and the sense that everything was spiraling out of control. But the days before her speech were still clear in her mind, and they’d all been colored with an overwhelming fear of public speaking; for a million reasons, it wasn’t an experience she was planning to repeat anytime soon.

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Grady?” She pulled away from him; it was bad enough when anyone touched her, these days. But nothing skeeved her out more than the familiar well-meaning shoulder grip, usually deployed by middle-aged men barred—by decorum, circumstance, Harper’s hostile glare, or their own awkwardness—from anything more openly affectionate. “How exactly am I serving my fellow students?”

  “At this afternoons auction, of course!” He tapped his clipboard. “I’ve got you down right here: dinner date with Harper Grace. Should go for a pretty penny, I’d wager, a popular girl like you.”

  “What?! No. No way. That’s a mistake. I never signed up for—”

  “Now, now, don’t be nervous. It’s a little late to back out now.”

  Her stomach churned, waiting for her to decide on an emotion—she was torn between fear (of having to go through with it) and loathing (for the demonic loser who’d signed her up). But neither of those would be of much help now. “Actually, Mr. Grady, I’m really going to have to—back out, I mean.” She gave him a weak, brave smile and put her hand to her head. “I’m just not feeling very well, and actually, I was headed off to the nurse.” Better to be fussed over by her mother and a team of hack doctors than to have to parade around on an auction block in front of the whole senior class, most of whom would undoubtedly be hoping—and waiting—for her to humiliate herself once again.

  The sympathy ploy might have worked on some teachers, but the oblivious Grady was too intent on insuring that everything followed his script and the show went on. “Nonsense!” he cried, flinging his hands in the air. “Stage fright, preshow jitters, that’s all. I’ve seen it a million times before. Nothing to worry about. This will do you good.” He put one hand on each of her shoulders, squeezed tight, and steered her firmly back into the school. “I expect to see you backstage in an hour, Harper. No excuses. This is going to be just the medicine you need.”

  “But Mr. Grady—” she protested, cursing the pleading tone in her voice and wondering what had happened to the authoritative, autocratic Harper Grace who could have any teacher wrapped around her little finger in under ten minutes. Another by-product of her “unfortunate turn” at the podium, she supposed, and the “unfortunate” events that followed. The teachers all looked at her with pity now, and a bit of wariness; they watched her, as if last month’s disaster had just been the beginning, and the full saga of destruction had yet to play out.

  “I’d hate to have to give you detention for backing out on your responsibilities,” he warned her in a jolly voice. “But I will, if need be. It’s for your own good, after all. Now, now, nothing to be afraid of,” he said, depositing her in front of her classroom. “As the bard says, ‘All the world’s a stage’! So really, we’re all performing, all the time. Even now.”

  Thanks for the heads up, Harper thought bitterly. Now tell me something I don’t know.

  “I’ve got thirty, do I hear thirty-five?”

  “Thirty-five!” a high, desperate voice shouted from the back.

  Mr. Grady beamed and waved his gavel in the air. “That’s thirty-five from the lovely lady in the back. Do I hear forty?”

  “Forty!”

  “Forty-five!”

  “Fifty!”

  “Fifty dollars!” Grady boomed. “We can do better than that.” Silence from the crowd. “Let me remind you ladies that you’re not just purchasing a lesson in driving a stick shift, you’re purchasing the company of this handsome young man for one entire afternoon. Now that must be worth at least fifty-five dollars!”

  It was worth twice that, Miranda thought, smiling at Kane’s obvious discomfort up onstage as Mr. Grady whipped the crowd into a frenzy. But if even if she hadn’t maxed out her allowance for the last few weeks, she wouldn’t have allowed herself to place a bid. That was most definitely against the rules.

  “Seventy-five dollars!” someone yelled. Miranda whipped around to her left and spotted Cheryl Sheppard, a ditzy brunette with a double-D chest and an even bigger wallet, waving her hand in the air.

  “Seventy-five dollars!” Mr. Grady announced, fanning himself as if the bid had caused some kind of heat stroke. “Do I hear more?”

  There were some murmured complaints from the crowd, but no one spoke up.

&n
bsp; “Going once?”

  “Going twice?”

  Crack! Miranda jumped as the gavel slammed against the podium. “Sold, to the young woman in blue.”

  Kane grinned and gave Cheryl a cocky wave before strutting offstage. At least that solved the mystery of why he would have deigned to participate in this kind of thing to begin with. Kane was the opposite of a joiner; he was the guy that—at least in junior high—joiners used to run away from for fear of wedgies. But Miranda supposed that the chance to watch a room full of girls practically throw money at the stage just for the privilege of spending an afternoon with him had been too much to resist.

  And she didn’t care, she told herself. This was yet another example of why Kane was the last person she should waste her time thinking about—evidence, as if she needed any more, that just because he’d finally noticed her lips were good for more than snarky banter didn’t mean he wanted anything more, or ever would. She should just smile and clap unenthusiastically, as she had after Lark Madison’s brownie-baking lesson went for twenty bucks and Scott Pearson’s old golf clubs went for fifty. Pretend you care that your class is raising some money, she reminded herself. Pretend you don’t care about him.

  ”Now that you ladies have had your turn, it’s time for the fellows to pull out your wallets, because next up, we have the beautiful Harper Grace.”

  Miranda almost choked.

  Grady waved his hand toward the wings. Nothing happened. Nodding his head at someone behind the curtain, he beckoned frantically, then turned back to the audience. “As I was saying, the beautiful Harper Grace.” Harper walked slowly and confidently toward the center of the stage, where she rejected his offer of a chair and stood with her hands on her hips, facing down the crowd. “She’s auctioning off one dinner date, at the restaurant of your choice. Shall we start the bidding at thirty dollars?”

  What the hell are you doing? Miranda asked silently, wishing she could send her best friend—if that was even the name for it these days—a telepathic message. She willed Harper to seek her out in the crowd, hoping that, if they made some eye contact, Harper could give her some kind of sign that would explain how she’d ended up as the poster girl for Grady’s manic auctioneering. But Harper wasn’t making eye contact with her, or anyone. She’d fixed her eyes on a point in the back of the room, above the heads of the audience, and remained frozen, expression serene, mouth fixed in a Mona Lisa smile. She looked almost as if she wanted to be up there; which, Miranda supposed, must somehow be the case.