The Wrong Side of Right

by Jenn Marie Thorne

  “I think you should stay behind,” he said, and the doors swished shut behind him.

  I peered out. It was like watching a silent film, seeing the Coopers wave to the crowds, file along the walkway to the podium, cameras flashing. When they got to the steps, Gabe turned back, searching for me in the dark windows of the bus. And then Gracie looked back too, her frown so deep that I wondered whether she was about to cry.

  I shut and locked the door to the back of the bus and changed back into my jeans in the darkness. Then, without turning on the light, I slumped into the senator’s office chair, feeling the cool leather warming against my cheek.

  Why didn’t the senator defend me, instead of Lou?

  Why didn’t I defend myself?

  The whys blurred into silence. I woke up when the bus started moving again. And I didn’t come out until it stopped.

  33

  The phone downstairs was ringing and no one was picking it up. The sound cut through my guest room door more and more sharply with each ring, until it finally reached through the haze surrounding me and was all I could hear.

  I got up from the bed and peeked into the hall. Gabe and Gracie were sitting on the floor of Gracie’s room divvying up a box of school supplies that had arrived at the house when we got back from the campaign event. They didn’t seem bothered by the sound of the phone, which had just started ringing again after a twenty-second respite.

  Downstairs, the study door was shut, and behind it rose hushed, angry voices. The senator. Then Meg. Then Meg again. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but this was obviously a conversation no phone call could interrupt.

  When I got to the kitchen, it started ringing again.

  Maybe it’s Andy, my brain recited.

  Yeah right.

  I pressed the phone numbly to my face. “Cooper residence.”

  “Kate? Oh thank God! Did you just get home? I’ve been calling all day—got tired of leaving voicemails!”

  “Uncle Barry?”

  In one rush, my stupor dropped away, and I felt my knees get so wobbly that I had to sit down on the cool tile of the kitchen floor, clutching the receiver to my cheek with both hands as if it were about to fly away.

  “Hey now.” I must have made a noise, because his voice got gravelly, like a cartoon grizzly bear. “What’s this? What’s going on over there? Do I need to come get you?”

  Yes.

  “No!” I swallowed hard and swiped my face. “Everything’s fine. I just hadn’t heard from you for . . . a long time! I thought maybe you forgot about me.”

  I laughed, but it came out like a sob.

  “Sweetheart, we’ve been away—on the cruise and then in St. Croix! Tess’s surprise trip for her birthday?”

  Of course. Now I remembered, a dim recollection growing brighter, Barry talking excitedly all summer about the cruise tickets he’d bought, in between asking me how I was and if I needed anything. Maybe those phone calls weren’t as perfunctory as I’d thought. Maybe I just hadn’t been listening.

  Relief washed through me.

  “How was it? Are you super-tan?”

  He ignored the question. “We get back here, and the news is saying you’re missing! What’s all this about?”

  “Missing?” I glanced down at myself to confirm that I still existed.

  “Every channel’s got the same footage of some event today that had all the Coopers out there except for you.”

  I’m not a Cooper, Barry. I’m a Quinn. Like you.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “I don’t care what plans they’ve got, I’m still your legal guardian, young lady, and I’m not sure I like what I’m seeing on TV.”

  Now he was really putting on the stern voice. It warmed me right down to my toes. My uncle, who’d never met a phone he didn’t hate, had cared enough to spend all day calling the house, hoping to reach me. That was saying something.

  The door to the study slammed open.

  “Fine.” Meg somehow managed to shout quietly. “I’m out of it. I’m done.”

  And the door shut again.

  “. . . So you tell me if you’re ready to come back, and I’ll clear your room out . . .”

  “Barry, I’ve gotta go. I—”

  Meg stalked from the hallway to the living room, angrily cleaning an invisible mess, chopping bundles of magazines against the coffee table so they made neat stacks.

  “I’ll call you back, I promise.”

  “I’m gonna keep the phone with me. I’m here for you, you know that, kiddo.”

  I hung up, crept into the living room, and drew a breath. My senior year had started without me. I needed to know what to tell Barry. What to do.

  I felt my heart thudding as I approached Meg, approached the moment of truth. My brain scrambled for more excuses, more delays.

  But Lou Mankowitz wasn’t here to fight this battle for me. I was going to have to fight it myself.

  “Meg? We need to talk.”

  “I know.” She looked up at me, her eyes brimming. “You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to. It was unfair to you from the very beginning.”

  My resolve faltered. “What?”

  She blinked and I kept going.

  “No, I—” I swallowed. “I need to know what’s going to happen next. School started last week in South Carolina, but if I get back there soon, I can catch up.”

  Her face wavered with confusion.

  My heart beat faster. “But if you want me to stay . . .”

  “Of course we—!” She shook her head, looked down at the coffee table. “You need to talk to your father. He’s got some things to tell you. But . . .” She let out an angry huff. “Now is not a good time.”

  Yeah, I thought. Now is a terrible time. Two weeks ago would have been much better. Or two months . . .

  Meg’s cheeks were wet. I touched her shoulder.

  “What’s going on?”

  She stared past me at the study door, her eyes steely. “He fired him.”

  My pulse raced with hope. “Elliott?”

  He deserved it. It was long overdue. He should never have been hired in the first place.

  “No.” Her eyes met mine and they were dim, like all the humor in them had finally been extinguished. “Lou. He fired Lou.”

  I thought for a moment that I was just standing there, paralyzed.

  But it wasn’t the living room around me—it was the hallway, and that was my hand on the study door, turning the handle and staggering into the room, slapped back into alertness by a blast from the air conditioner and by the senator, slowly swiveling in his office chair to take me in with obvious apprehension.

  He leaned back, his face re-forming into that oh-so-familiar expression. Poised. Confident. I spoke before it could fully set in.

  “How could you?”

  He feigned bewilderment. His acting was getting worse by the minute. And I no longer had it in me to play along.

  As I slammed the door shut behind me, he half stood from the desk in alarm.

  “Why would you fire Louis? He was your best friend. Your college roommate.”

  His mouth moved but nothing was coming out.

  I stepped closer. “And he defended me.”

  “He assaulted a coworker.” The senator turned back to his computer and started typing. “This isn’t your business, Kate.”

  My hands were shaking, my skin hot against the blast from the vent.

  But shaky or not, my hands were bolder than the rest of me. They reached out and slammed the senator’s laptop shut. He rolled back, eyebrows raised. One blink, and he managed an almost amused expression, but he still wouldn’t look at me.

  My eyes were brimming, the whole room flooding, only a few minutes left before the water grew too high for either of us to survive. I braced my hands against the desk, trying to regain control of myself.

  “Elliott called me a slut, Dad.” I’d expected the word slut to hurt, but it was the Dad that really cut me. It
was a lie. A joke. “He called your daughter a slut. Me. Your kid. And you fired the one person—the only person in that whole bus who would defend me. You didn’t do anything. You . . .” I gasped a breath. “You made a joke out of it! And then you acted like it was my fault, like I’d caused the whole thing. Like I’d done anything except just stand there!”

  The senator didn’t say anything. I could only see his profile, his jaw clenched and temple thumping. A noise came out of me, almost a wail, and he didn’t turn. As I blinked, the room drained and my face stung, but I was still suffocating and he wasn’t doing a thing to help me.

  “I’m your child. Don’t you care? You made me, you’re part of me, and you don’t even care.” Stop talking, please stop talking, but it was too late to stop. “I have a life, you know, my own life. I’m supposed to, anyway. I’m supposed to be going into my senior year. I’m supposed to be studying, graduating, going to college, but you don’t care at all. You don’t even notice. I might as well not exist. You wish I didn’t exist!”

  “Kate.” His face dropped and I thought for one beautiful moment that he was going to tell me I was wrong. That he loved me. That I was overreacting. “It’s late.” He sighed. Opened his computer and shrugged. “What do you want from me?”

  My breath stilled. The tears dried in my eyes so quickly that the room looked crystalline—bright, hard, sharp. It was as though I was seeing the way the world really looked for the very first time.

  I considered for what felt like a long moment. It was an important question.

  And then I had my answer.

  “I want you to look at me.”

  He stared at the wall. Then away, out the darkened window. And then, finally, he turned and his eyes reached mine and held there. I found myself counting, one . . . two . . . three . . . waiting for something, anything.

  We had the same eyes. But his were cold. There was no one there.

  “Anything else?”

  “Nope.” I nodded. “Nothing else.”

  I wiped my nose on my wrist as I quietly shut the study door behind me and started up the stairs. Meg was waiting for me halfway up, her hands pressed together to her lips like she’d been praying. Slowly, she rose, hope and worry flashing in an alternating current over her face.

  “I know you’re angry, Kate . . .”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

  “What you were asking about before.” She held my arm, her fingers trembling. “We already enrolled you at Farnwell Prep! You’re starting on Monday. Mark was supposed to tell you a long time ago—we agreed he’d tell you.” She swallowed down her frustration and tried to keep smiling. “We’ve talked to your uncle Barry and everything’s set. He’s shipping your things up—”

  “We can talk about it tomorrow.” I slid past her, my arm dragging behind me along the banister as I climbed.

  “Oh.” Meg dropped a step. “Okay. You’re right. Tomorrow. Everything will look fresher in the morning.”

  Before I reached the top of the steps, I reconsidered. I hurried back down, and Meg’s arms were open, ready, and then she held me tight, smoothing my hair over and over. I closed my eyes, trying to soak up her warmth, the smell of her moisturizer, the sharp line of her glasses against my head.

  “Good night, sweetheart,” she said.

  Later that night, after Meg and the senator had gone to bed, I stood in the hall peering in at the twins, first Gabe, smiling in his sleep and then Gracie, her blond hair sticky with sweat. She’d kicked the covers off the end of her bed, just like every night.

  In the back corner of the guest room closet, I found the old blue duffel bag that I’d packed for a weekend back in June. Buried among hanging dresses were the jeans and three T-shirts I’d brought with me from South Carolina. I folded them and put them in the bag.

  I slipped in the bird sketch that Gabe had drawn for me, along with the photo of the three of us from Time magazine that Meg had had framed. I packed the little star necklace that Gracie had given me and the journal from Gabe, but left the birthday gifts from Meg and the senator behind. I buried the Kudzu Giants record behind a shoebox in the far corner of the closet.

  As I went to close the door, my fingers lingered on the cotton dress I’d worn the night of Jake Spinnaker’s birthday party. I clutched it hard. Closed my eyes. My breath hurt when it came. Let it go, I thought. Let him go.

  I left the dress and shut the door. Then I zipped up the bag and waited.

  Just after 1:00 A.M., I silently left my room, glided down the stairs and out the front door, latching the little switch on the handle so it would lock behind me.

  Out on the dark porch, I checked the side pocket of my bag for about the tenth time. I still had five twenties in there, the same amount Barry had given me before I left. That should be enough for a bus ticket and a prepaid phone. And if it wasn’t, at least it would get me close enough for Barry to come pick me up. It would get me away.

  Left out the gate, then turn right when I reach the main road. I knew the route from our many drives into DC. The depot was a few miles down, on the right. It was dark, but the streets would be lit. I hoped there was a sidewalk.

  It doesn’t matter. Just go.

  I started on my way, slowly, stifling the crunch of my feet against the pavers of the front drive.

  The moon was almost full, the oaks along the property line casting black shadows against the blue lawn, the wind sending a whisper through their leaves. I fell into such a sad reverie listening to it that I didn’t notice the footsteps approaching from the darkness.

  I gasped.

  The figure was large, approaching at a terrifying speed. But as he got close enough for me to pick out his features, my whole body slumped with relief.

  It was James. He exhaled hard, his hand relaxing from the gun on his hip.

  “What are you doing out here?” He whispered it, thank goodness. He glanced at the house, then back to me with a suspicious squint. “You’re not sneaking out to see the president’s kid, are you?”

  “No.” I shouldered my bag. “I’m going home.”

  He wavered, confused. “This is your home.”

  “No, it’s not.” I inched closer. “My uncle is my legal guardian. I go to school in South Carolina and it started three days ago. I have to get down there.”

  “At one oh seven in the morning?” He crossed his arms.

  “They won’t let me go. The campaign. They’ll make me stay and I don’t want to. I mean—legally, they have to let me go. But I’m not sure that’ll matter to them.”

  James let out a slow sigh. I could see his morality meter swishing back and forth.

  “Just let me go,” I murmured. “I don’t belong here.”

  Holding my breath, I willed my legs to move, one step at a time, past him, toward the gate.

  He grabbed my arm. I turned.

  “You can’t just walk out of here.”

  I lifted my chin, trying for defiance. “Why not?”

  He glared at me. “Because there’s a news van parked right outside the driveway waiting for something to happen. You sneaking out? That’s something happening.”

  Blood rushed to my face. “Oh.”

  “Oh.”

  I remembered Nancy suddenly, standing in the study, mocking me, turning against me. But James wasn’t Nancy. He was watching me with concern, trying his best to hide a kind smile under the usual tough-guy demeanor.

  “Well, I won’t go that way then. I’ll . . .”

  I glanced at the dark garden running beside the house. The fence was only a little higher than the ones I’d scaled in South Carolina, breaking out of the press siege with Tim the Awful Aide that bleary morning in June. I did it once, I can do it again.

  “You don’t want to climb that,” James muttered, reading my mind. “There’s barbed wire on the other side. And we’ve got two guards on duty who I didn’t train, and therefore can’t vouch for. They see somebody on top of that fence, they’ve got orders to shoot.”r />
  This time we said it together. “Oh.”

  James grinned. I spun around.

  “News van it is,” I said, and started toward the gate.

  Behind me, James groaned. “All right. Where are you going?”

  “Greyhound station. There’s a bus at two oh seven, so I really need to get—”

  “I’m driving.” He jangled his keys and motioned for me to follow him back down the drive to where the SUV was parked. “Probably gonna get reassigned to a desk job for this.”

  “Then don’t!” I whispered, slamming to a halt. “It’s not worth it.”

  “You’re right.” He crossed his arms. “So go upstairs and go back to bed.”

  I stared him down.

  “Didn’t think so. We’re at an impasse.”

  As I fastened myself into the passenger seat next to him, James peered ruefully at me over one huge shoulder.

  “You know I have to tell them.”

  I managed a nod.

  He sniffed, started the ignition. “But I’ll wait until I get back. That’ll give you a head start if the bus is on time.”

  “Thank you.”

  After I bought my ticket, James drove away. I sat on one of the depot’s plastic benches with my duffel bag on my lap and watched the parking lot, waiting for James to come careening back, this time with the senator in the backseat. He’d run out, rip the ticket from my hand, and wrap me in a hug.

  He’d apologize, and I’d forgive him.

  But the bus was on time. And I got on it.

  34

  I settled into a window seat in the back and watched the world blur, the streetlamps streaking, lonely comets to light our way. When we hit the freeway, it felt like we were flying, like a cord had been cut between us and the station. Between me and DC. Me and the Coopers. Me and Andy. I was free.

  It was my choice all along. Meg was right. And I chose to go. I chose something.

  All around me were strangers traveling south, some transferring with me when we stopped in Richmond a few hours later, others staying behind to wait for buses yet to come, still others greeting family members, husbands, wives before veering off and away, never to be seen again. The sun was up now, bleary behind a curtain of cloud cover.