Havoc: Mayhem Series #4

by Jamie Shaw

  Mike just watches me, no judgment in his eyes, and I breathe a little more evenly.

  “Well, really, I don’t even know if she made the turkey. She probably ordered it precooked or something. But anyway, her turkey was as big as a full-grown Yorkshire pi— uh . . . a really big pig. One of those huge pink ones.” Mike nods his understanding, and I force myself to stop stammering. “Right. So, this turkey could’ve fed fifty people even after the seven of us ate our fill. It was honestly the biggest, most beautiful turkey I’d ever seen, but my mom . . . my mom had always made the turkey before, and hers had never been anything near that size, and I could see how bad she felt about it.”

  A frown slips onto Mike’s face, and I remember the look my mom wore that day.

  “I remember looking across the table, and my mom smiled at me, and all I could think was that I’d never seen her look so sad. And Danica was sitting right next to me, and she kept asking us if we’d ever seen a turkey that big, and talking about how she’d never seen a turkey even half that size.”

  I roll my eyes, remembering how oblivious she was. I even kicked her under the table at one point, but all she did was smack me and loudly order me to watch where I was putting my feet.

  “And her parents weren’t any better, talking about how they had to contact special people to get this special turkey, and how special it all was.” I sigh and shake my head. “So my uncle finished carving this ridiculous turkey, and he went to put some on my plate, and I just threw my hands over my plate and said, ‘Oh no, I’m a vegetarian.’”

  I laugh to myself, and Mike smiles up at me.

  “All of a sudden I was the center of attention instead of that stupid turkey, and everyone was gaping at me, and Danica got so mad. She kept ordering me to admit I was lying and eat the turkey, but I never did.” My proud smile stretches across my face. “Because that was the day I became a vegetarian.”

  “You haven’t eaten meat in eight years just to spite your family?”

  “I guess so,” I say with a chuckle, and Mike belly-laughs until he starts coughing and has to roll away from me again.

  “You’re amazing,” he praises when he finally catches his breath, and I grin at the side of his head.

  “A real rebel.” One who never stayed out past curfew, didn’t get a car until she was eighteen, and babysat her brother on weekends for fun.

  “Tell me something else.”

  I ask Mike what he wants to know, and the list of things he comes up with is endless. We pass hour after hour with story after story.

  He asks me why I want to be a veterinarian, and I tell him about the thirteen photos my mom keeps in a hatbox in her closet. Every year on the first day of school, she stood me on our front porch with a sign that read, “When I grow up, I want to be a . . .” And every year, that sentence was finished with “a veterinarian.” The handwriting changed over time—from my mom’s, to a child’s sloppy lettering, to the handwriting I use today—but the dream has always been the same. I’ve wanted to be a veterinarian for as long as I can remember, because I wanted to care for pets that were loved instead of simply cared for. I grew up knowing not to get too attached to the chickens or pigs we owned—with the exception of Teacup, who was my birthday present for my sweet sixteenth—but it’s always hurt my heart a little, knowing that they were never truly loved. So I loved our dogs and cats extra, and I’ve always wanted to spend my life helping people who love their animals just as much as I love mine, and to make sure that their animals stay with them as long as possible.

  Mike asks me other things too—like what it was like growing up on a farm, if it’s hard when the dogs get adopted from the shelter, if I plan on moving back to Indiana once I get my degree. He asks a million thoughtful questions that I answer with stories. I tell him about the sick baby goat I rescued at home and how it was the first animal I ever named. I tell him about the time I broke my arm when I cartwheeled right out of our barn’s hayloft. I tell him about falling asleep to the smell of rain falling outside my window. I tell him about the poodle that got adopted from the shelter by a little boy and his family last week, and how it wouldn’t stop licking the boy’s face and clothes.

  I tell him stories until my eyelids are drooping and my hand is heavy on his shoulder. And I notice when he begins shivering beneath my palm.

  “Are you shaking again?” I ask, leaning forward to study Mike’s face. In the glow of the TV, I can see the sweat glistening on his forehead.

  “I’m fine,” he chatters with his eyes closed.

  “You’re not.” I glance at the clock, and my stomach plummets. “You were due for more cold medicine an hour ago.” It’s past eleven. Where did the time go?

  “I didn’t want to get up,” he reasons, and I hiss when I press my palm against his face.

  “You’re burning up.” Another big shiver rocks through him, and I push his hair away from his forehead. “Let me up.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m comfortable.”

  “I’m just going to get more cold medicine,” I promise, sliding out from beneath him. I curse my shitty nursing skills all the way to the kitchen, where I grab the cold medicine, a glass and bowl full of cold water, and a washcloth.

  “Here,” I say so that he’ll sit up when I get back. Standing in front of the couch, I hand him a measuring cap full of blue medicine, and then I give him a glass of water. He drinks it down and stares up at me, waiting until I sit back down in my seat at the end of the couch.

  Two seconds later, his head is in my lap again. No pillow. Just his cheek and his scruff and his breath against my jeans.

  My trembling hand dips the washcloth into the bowl I set on the side table. I wring it out one-handed and gently place it against Mike’s forehead. “Does that feel okay?”

  His arm wraps around my legs, his fingers tucking beneath my thigh. I couldn’t wiggle out from under him now even if I tried. “Yeah.”

  My whole body aches from how tense my muscles are, but still, I brush that washcloth over Mike’s forehead again and again, slowly and softly. I comb his damp hair away from his forehead with the fingers of one hand and follow it with the cold washcloth I hold like a lifeline in the other. “You should be in bed.”

  Mike’s fingers slide a little further beneath my jeans, his hold on my legs growing even snugger. “I should be right here.”

  “Danica wouldn’t like this,” I blurt, because my heart is pounding and my blood is rushing and Mike’s cheek is on my legs.

  “Danica isn’t here.”

  I freeze with the washcloth against his temple, and Mike turns his chin to look up at me. “It’s fine.” At my doubtful expression, he swears, “It’s fine. Trust me . . . It’s going to be fine.”

  I don’t know if I believe him, but when he turns away from me again, I run the washcloth over his forehead. I let him hold me, and I take care of him, even though in my heart, I know none of this is fine.

  Danica should be taking care of him.

  She is who he should be holding.

  I shouldn’t have these feelings.

  “I’m not her, Mike.”

  “I know,” he says. “Trust me. I know.”

  Chapter 17

  “I stayed because I had to,” I tell the bobble-head zombie gnashing at me from my dashboard. “He was so sick. You should have seen him, Danica.”

  The bobble head nods furiously as I drive over a railroad track, its level of crazy a good match for my cousin’s.

  “Why didn’t I call you?” My thumbs pick at my steering wheel as I try to brainstorm a good answer. “Because I didn’t want you to get worried and come over and end up getting sick and having to miss the music video. I know how important it is to you.”

  I release the inside of my lip between my teeth, remembering what Mike said about my tell.

  “Of course nothing happened. I’m your cousin, Danica. God.”

  The zombie judges me in silence.r />
  “I swear! All he did was shiver and throw up all night. I wanted to take him to the doctor’s, that way I wouldn’t have to hang there all night, but he wouldn’t let me.”

  I frown in the rearview mirror when I realize I’m chewing my lip again. My dark eyebrows turn in, and my bottom lip pushes out. Unbrushed curls remind me of hours spent sleeping on Mike’s couch—his head on my lap, his arms around my legs.

  “I’m not lying,” I say to my reflection, and then I tell the zombie, “I have nothing to feel guilty about.”

  He nods at me, I nod back, and I reluctantly turn left into the parking lot of the apartment I share with Danica.

  I concentrate on my lip as I walk up the entryway stairs, as I turn the doorknob, as I cautiously step inside. And when Danica leaps off the couch and flies at me, I nearly throw my arms up to protect myself.

  “Which color?” she asks as I flinch, thrusting a nail polish bottle in my face. “For the music video. This one, or this one?”

  I stare at two identical shades of hot pink and then up into my taller cousin’s dark eyes. Thrown off by her nonviolent greeting, I jam my foot far, far down into my throat. “Don’t you want to know where I was?”

  Danica stands with the bottles still held in the air, her eyebrow lifting into a skyward arch. “Weren’t you at the dog shelter?”

  “I stayed with Mike,” I confess, and when her face twists with some emotion that hasn’t fully formed yet, I admonish, “He was really sick, Dani.”

  I wasn’t expecting this—this anger that’s come over me—but it works to my advantage, because instead of breaking a nail polish bottle against the wall and stabbing my eye out with it, she lowers the bottles and asks with only a slight amount of skepticism, “Like how sick?”

  “Like sweating uncontrollably and throwing up all night.”

  Her face wrinkles. “Ew.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is he now?”

  “Better,” I answer, my hard tone softening. “His fever broke. His throat is still scratchy and he’s still really weak and exhausted from being sick for so long, but he should be fine in a couple days.”

  Danica considers me like a viper considers a mouse, eyes attentive and muscles tight. My tiny heart races and races as I wonder if she’s going to strike, or if she’s going to let me live in her aquarium to play with another day.

  “Well, thanks for doing that for me,” she finally says, and my brain short-circuits. Did Danica seriously just thank me for spending the night with her boyfriend? “Did you tell him the basket was from me?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Did he like it?”

  I nod again, and she smiles.

  “Good. Now pick a color.”

  I lift a random hand, point to a random bottle, and listen to Danica spend the next few minutes explaining why that color is horrible. She decides to go with the other, identical shade of pink, and I eventually escape to my room, where I plop down on the edge of my bed and stare at a pale indigo wall.

  I’m Alice in Wonderland, shrinking to two inches tall as I try to solve riddles and believe impossible things.

  Mike is in love with Danica, but he clings to me in his sleep.

  Danica hates me, but she thanks me when I take care of her boyfriend.

  I’m a good person, but my heart pounds every time I see my cousin’s boyfriend. Or hear my cousin’s boyfriend. Or think of my cousin’s boyfriend.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and inhale a deep breath, trying to clear the caterpillar’s smoke from my head. I’m thinking of Red Queens and singing flowers and houses of cards—when my door flies open and the knob smashes the doorstopper right through the wall.

  Danica stands there, her face a twisted mask of rage. “YOU LYING FUCKING SLUT!”

  I gape at her.

  “What the fuck did you do over there last night?!”

  My heart hurtles over an impossible beat before careening onto its face. “What?” squeaks my dormouse voice.

  “Don’t sit there playing innocent, you whore! What the fuck is this?!”

  She shoves her phone in my face, and I read two texts with Mike’s name at the top.

  I tried. It’s over.

  Please tell Hailey she forgot her phone.

  When I stare wide-eyed up at Danica, all of her delicate features are painted a deep, furious red. “I—”

  “You fucked him!”

  “I didn’t!” I argue. I’d stand up to defend myself, but Danica is practically on top of me.

  “You are such a fucking liar! You’ve wanted him since the day you saw him! Admit it, you bitch!”

  “There’s nothing to admit!” I scream as I stand up, forcing Danica back. “I didn’t sleep with your fucking boyfriend!”

  “Then why is he breaking up with me?” she shouts back at me, her hands curling into fists at her sides. I should take them as a warning, but adrenaline is exploding through my veins.

  “Maybe because you don’t fucking love him? Maybe because you’re a self-centered bitch who only cares about yourself!”

  Danica’s mouth drops open like it’s about to come unhinged and swallow me whole. My body tenses in anticipation of the blow she’s about to deal me, but instead of punching me, she walks over to my desk.

  “Get the fuck out of my house,” she orders, pushing my computer over with all of her might. It flies off the desktop and crashes onto the floor, taking my half-finished midterm exam files with it.

  I stare at the computer and then at Danica, tears welling in my eyes.

  “Are you fucking deaf?” she asks, grabbing a framed picture of my family from the desk and launching it at the wall behind me. The glass shatters into a million pieces behind my back. “Get the fuck out!” Danica screams, grabbing the side of my flimsy desk and flipping the entire thing over. A leg breaks off of it as it crashes onto the floor, taking my textbooks and folders with it. Papers scatter all over the hardwood, and I drop to my knees to collect them.

  “You are such fucking trash,” Danica snarls as she stands over me. When I reach for my biology textbook, she kicks it out of my reach. “Wait until my dad hears about what a little slut you are. Bye-bye tuition.”

  Tears drip onto the papers beneath my knees as I gather them with shaking hands. I don’t even know why I bother—when Danica’s dad stops paying for my tuition, none of it will matter.

  “Say something, you bitch!” Danica screams.

  “I didn’t sleep with him,” I swear again, my voice breaking on a sob, and Danica’s laughter fills my room.

  She continues calling me names and trashing my room as I grab what I can and shove it into my backpack—school supplies, some clothes from drawers that she empties onto the floor, a few personal effects that I know she’ll destroy if I leave them behind. And then I grab my keys from the bed and walk toward the front door with Danica breathing down the back of my neck.

  “Don’t you ever fucking come back here,” she warns as she kicks the backs of my heels. “Mike is going to realize what a worthless piece of hick shit you are, and he’s going to beg for me to take him back. And you know what? I will, Hailey. Because he is mine, and you are nothing. You’ll always be nothing.”

  She stops at the door, standing on the stoop as my weak legs carry me to my car. I struggle to unlock my car door with trembling fingers, my vision blurred with unshed tears.

  “Bye-bye, slut!” Danica screams loud enough for the neighbors to hear when I get into my car. I spare one last glance to find her waving at me with her fingers, a venomous grin on her face. Tears stream down my cheeks as I put the car into reverse and back away from our apartment.

  On the road, I think of the way her smile dimpled when we were kids. I think of how I’m going to explain to my parents that I need to move back home. I think of the waitressing job I’ll have to spend the rest of my life working. I think of how tightly Mike held me last night, how he smiled at me this morning, how I’ll never see him again when I’m living on
a farm in Indiana. I think of all the sweet dreams I never should have had.

  Another sob chokes me, and I park along the side of the road to fall completely, utterly apart.

  Chapter 18

  In the back of a kennel, at the back of a hallway, at the back of a shelter, I sit with my forehead on my knees and an overweight basset hound licking the sausage grease off my fingers. Somewhere under the fluorescent lighting of this hallway, I lost track of time. I’m not sure if I lost it in the first cage or the second cage or the third cage, but now here I am, at the very last cage, with nowhere else to go.

  “Hailey,” singsongs the shelter director, Barb, as her grass-stained Timberland boots echo down the hallway. “A strapping young man is here to see yooou.”

  I peek up from my knees to see her grinning from ear to ear as Mike steps into view. He looks a thousand times better than he did this morning, freshly showered and shaved in a black Dogfish Head T-shirt and well-worn jeans. Barb waggles her bushy eyebrows as she lifts the lock and lets him inside.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask as she walks away, and Mike crouches down to pet the potbelly pup sniffing excitedly at his side.

  “Trying to find you.” He lifts his eyes from the dog to me, his expression telling me that he heard about what happened. “Danica told me she kicked you out.”

  “Did she tell you she trashed my room?” I ask, ignoring the way my eyes start to burn. “Or that she broke my computer? Or destroyed my desk?”

  Mike sits down next to me, hesitating a moment before he wraps a comforting arm around my shoulders. The basset hound immediately lays its head and front paws on Mike’s lap, its overplump tummy drooping onto the ground.

  “I’m taking you home with me,” Mike says, hugging me tight against his side. “I already filled out the adoption papers.”

  My eyes burn hotter, and a scalding tear traces a line down my cheek. “I’m driving home tomorrow.”

  “To Indiana?” Mike asks, shifting to look at me. I avoid his eyes. “Why?”