by Diane Hoh
Marty arrived on time. He, too, moved stiffly, his customary confident swagger defeated by aching muscles. Purple bruises streaked his cheekbones and discolored his strong, square jaw.
He greeted her with a gentle hug. “Sleep at all?”
She nodded. “But I can’t find out anything about Julie and Gabe. Have you heard anything?”
“No. We’re not going to learn anything unless we go to the hospital. We can do that after we get the flowers and stuff.”
That lifted Alex’s spirits a little. It was good to have a plan. “Maybe we can drag Jenny away from there.” Then she added quickly, “If Julie’s okay, I mean.”
She averted her eyes when they passed the accident scene again. But not before she saw that although the glass had been removed or had blown away, the black, bare tree limb still lay in the ditch by the side of the road.
“Hold on,” Marty said, sensing her tension, “we’ll be past in a sec.”
And they were. But Alex knew she would have to pass that site many times. Would she ever reach the point where seeing it wouldn’t bother her? That seemed impossible now. Maybe, if Julie and Gabe weren’t hurt as seriously as everyone thought they were, maybe after a while she could drive right by that spot without cringing.
If Julie and Gabe were okay.
They bought a white wicker basket filled with rust, yellow, and orange flowers for Julie, and a bouquet of brightly colored balloons for Gabe. They were leaving the gift shop just as Kiki Duff came out of Vinnie’s, a large white pizza box in hand. Kyle and Bennett were right behind her.
“This isn’t for me,” Kiki cried. “I really am on a diet, honest! This is for Gabe. He called Bennett and asked for it, so I guess he’s feeling better.”
That was good news.
And Bennett was walking without crutches.
“I guess you’re better, too,” Alex commented as they all headed for their vehicles in the parking lot. “No crutches? Did you toss them?”
“Had to. With Gabe out, Salem needs all the help it can get. I can’t sit around nursing my lumps when the team’s in trouble. My knees are fine.”
Medical miracle? Alex wondered, but she said nothing. Bennett wasn’t a stupid person. He wouldn’t play—and Coach Jeffers wouldn’t let him—unless he really was okay.
“Here, look at this!” Kiki said, handing the pizza box to Bennett and pushing something toward Alex.
It was a small, white card.
Alex recognized it instantly. It was from the fortune-telling machine.
“You had your fortune told?”
Kiki grinned. “Yep. Go ahead, read it!”
Alex read, SELF-DISCIPLINE IS THE GREATEST OF ALL VIRTUES.
She handed the card back to Kiki. “You wasted a quarter. My grandmother used to tell me the same thing when I wouldn’t clean my room, and she didn’t charge me for it.”
“Well, don’t you get it?” Kiki said. “It’s like he knew I wanted to go on a diet, and didn’t have the self-discipline to do it.”
Alex made a sound of disgust. “Kiki, for pete’s sake! Someone who weighs ninety pounds and doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her could have got that card.”
“Yeah, but she didn’t. I got it. And I don’t weigh ninety pounds. But I will now. I’ve already started my diet, and I’m going to stay on it this time.”
Alex knew she wouldn’t. Kiki was always going on a diet of one kind or another, and never stuck to it for more than a few days. “If you weighed ninety pounds,” Alex said as she climbed into Marty’s car, “you’d look like a twig. You’re too tall to weigh that.” That was probably Kiki’s trouble. She dieted briefly, in hopes of looking petite, like the twins, and then got so discouraged when it didn’t happen, that she fell off her diet.
The same thing would probably happen this time, in spite of the little white card.
At the hospital, they were told that Julie was not allowed visitors. But the nurse agreed to phone her room so Alex could talk to Jenny.
She sounded very tired. “Julie’s still not awake. She has a concussion. The doctor keeps telling me that it’s okay, her sleeping like this, but it scares me. Can you come up?”
“They won’t let us. Can you come up to Gabe’s room? He’s allowed visitors, so we’re all going up there. It’s room 312.”
When Jenny stepped out of the elevator on the third floor where Alex was waiting, Alex’s heart sank. She looked terrible. Her face was bruised and swollen, and she obviously hadn’t slept. When Alex hugged her, Jenny said, “I’ve tried to contact my parents. They’re in Ireland on a vacation they’d planned for years. How can I tell them what’s happened? I just left a message. Can we go in and see Gabe now? Maybe that will cheer me up.”
Gabe was grinning at something someone had said when Alex and Jenny walked in. But his freckles stood out like neon dots on a face as white as his pillowcase. Both legs, lying above the sheet, were swathed in white. “Join the feast,” he told the girls. “No one came empty-handed.”
The pizza from Vinnie’s was being passed around, along with boxes of huge, fresh cookies and chocolate candy. Gabe insisted that everyone help themselves.
Kiki, a fat chunk of chocolate halfway to her mouth, looked at Alex with a guilty grin. “Tomorrow,” she announced, “tomorrow I start my diet, absolutely.”
Alex had to smile. So much for the message about self-discipline on The Wizard’s card.
Gabe seemed much better than they’d expected, and the atmosphere in his room was like a party. Until he asked Jenny, “So where’s your better half? In bed with a killer of a headache, I’d bet. I saw her head slam into that steering wheel before my own lights went out. She hit it hard. Is she sleeping it off? She’ll be in to see me this afternoon, though, right?”
Alex froze. Oh, no. No one had told Gabe about Julie? And then she realized that of course the medical staff wouldn’t have told him, not wanting to upset him. And Jenny had been downstairs in Julie’s room all night and morning. Even if she’d had the chance, telling Gabe would have been far too painful for Jenny.
A miserable silence filled the room. Gabe picked up on it right away. “She’s hurt?” he asked. “Bad?”
“Gabe,” Marty began, moving closer to the bed, but Kiki interrupted him.
“It’s her face,” she said bluntly. “Smashed.” She bit into a giant chocolate chip cookie. “Probably never be the same.”
“Kiki!” Alex cried as Jenny paled and clutched the wall for support.
Kiki shrugged. “No point in lying to him. He’ll see for himself soon enough.”
Gabe frowned. “Well, she’s not in a coma, or crippled or anything, is she? I mean, except for her face, she’s okay, right?”
“No, no coma,” Jenny assured him. Some of the color returned to her face. “She’s not awake yet, but they keep telling me she will be, any minute now.”
“Just don’t give her a mirror,” Kiki muttered, reaching for the candy box.
“Kiki,” Kyle said in a calm, polite voice, “have some candy. It’ll keep your mouth occupied.”
While Gabe and Jenny talked quietly about Julie, Marty steered the conversation to happier subjects. Soon they were talking about that week’s football game. Alex would go to the game Saturday—she wasn’t a big football fan, but she always went to see her friends play. Gabe and Bennett, Kyle and Marty were all freshmen, but they were good. So they’d played some. Not enough to satisfy them, but more than most freshmen. They were a part of the team, and it seemed important to be there for them. They all hated having so little play time. They had all complained about it.
Alex thought she understood. It was hard enough being a freshman, after being a bigshot high school senior. It must be even worse if you’d spent three or four years being a hotshot football star…getting your name in the paper and on the local news, going to banquets held in your honor, dating the prettiest and most popular girls in school because you were a big-deal athlete. And then getting to college where the
re were tons of guys just as good as you were, some of them bigger, some older. The upperclassmen got most of the playing time on the football field.
“At least we all made the team,” Marty had told her after a party a week or so ago. “There are guys here who were really big deals in high school, and they didn’t last a week here. I have nightmares about that happening.”
Gabe was asking Jenny which room Julie was in. “If they ever let me out of this bed,” he said, shifting his weight with a painful grimace, “I’ll hike on down to see her. She’s probably scared.” He smiled halfheartedly. “This is a very scary place.”
Jenny was just about to tell him Julie’s room number, when a nurse appeared in the doorway. “Miss Pierce,” she said tersely, “you’d better come with me. Your sister is awake.”
Without a word, Jenny whirled and ran out of the room.
Alex jumped up. “I’m going, too! Even if they don’t let me in the room, I can wait outside in the hall.”
“We’ll all go,” Kiki said.
“No! The last thing in the world Julie needs in her room is a crowd.” Alex turned to leave. “I’ll let you all know how she is, I promise.” Then she hurried down to Julie’s room.
She had just reached the second floor when she heard the scream.
Chapter 5
FULL OF ANGUISH, THE cry rang out across the white-walled corridor.
Alex ran.
Jenny’s voice, frantic and pleading, followed the scream.
The first thing Alex noticed as she burst into the room was the mirror. It was in Julie’s left hand, held up in front of her white-cocooned face. The large, oval frame had a long, thick handle fashioned of embellished gold. The intricate design on the handle looked like gold-dipped snakes entwined.
Jenny was trying desperately to wrest the mirror from her sister’s grip.
Alex had never seen the twins in even a minor dispute. She was shocked by the sight of the two girls struggling on the bed.
“Give it to me,” Jenny sobbed, “please! You’re not supposed to have that, not yet. Where did you get it? Give it to me!”
But Julie, only her eyes and a tiny bit of lip showing through her cocoon of white, clung tenaciously to the ugly mirror handle. Her horrified eyes never left her reflection, and a low, guttural moaning flowed from her lips.
“Where did she get that mirror?” the nurse barked as she rushed into the room. “You give that to me, young lady, this minute!”
She was stronger than Jenny. When she had the mirror safely in hand, she said to Jenny over the sound of Julie’s moaning, “Did you give her this?”
Jenny looked at her with stricken eyes. “You think that I—?”
Alex was livid. She took up Jenny’s side. “She would never, never do something so cruel,” she told the nurse heatedly. “Especially not to her own sister. And she doesn’t even own a mirror like that. She’d never buy anything that ugly.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “But she’s the only person we’ve allowed in the room. So where did this mirror come from?”
“I didn’t,” Jenny murmured, “I wouldn’t…”
“Of course you didn’t,” Alex soothed. “We know you didn’t.”
But then, who did? she wondered. Who would be so cruel? Who wanted Julie to suffer more than she already had?
If I knew who did this, she thought with an anger that surprised her with its ferociousness, I’d…I’d…Alex took a deep breath. Then she turned to see what the accident had done to Julie.
She couldn’t tell. All those bandages…the fresh, pretty face was a wad of white, like a snow-covered beehive. But the eyes, from which tears poured, were the same. The same clear blue…full, now, of pain and fear.
Alex could only hope that Julie had forgotten she’d ever complained about having a “boring” face. If she remembered, those words would haunt her.
When the nurse had given the distraught patient an injection to calm her down, Alex drew the nurse aside. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Are you a relative?”
“Yes,” Alex answered without hesitation. “I’m the older sister.”
The nurse eyed her warily, but said after a moment, “It’s not as bad as it looks. Her face took quite a beating, but the doctor who was on call is the best. He did some preliminary reconstruction work right away. She’ll need more, of course. But at least now she won’t look so bad when the bandages come off.”
Alex winced. Julie wouldn’t look “so bad”? She hoped the nurse wouldn’t be tactless enough to use that phrase within Julie’s hearing. It would scare her to death.
Julie returned to sleep quickly. Alex was able to persuade Jenny to return to the dorm for a shower and a good night’s sleep. They went upstairs to say good-bye to Gabe, and then Marty drove them home.
The sun was shining on the river when they left the hospital. Most of the storm debris had been cleared away. Twin Falls looked normal again. “You’d think the storm had never happened,” Alex murmured as they left town.
“But it did,” Jenny said, and then fell silent again, staring out the car window.
She must be so scared, Alex thought. Her sister’s in the hospital, her parents are so far away. What’s it like to be that scared?
I’ve had it so easy all my life, she told herself, feeling a twinge of guilt. The crash last night is the only bad thing that’s ever happened to me. And I wasn’t even hurt, not like Julie and Gabe were. And Jenny was hurt, too. Maybe it doesn’t show on the outside, but it’s there. I can see it in her eyes.
When they got back to campus, Marty went to the library to work on a speech for his sociology class. Jenny took a long, hot shower, while Alex fielded questions about Julie from anxious friends. There was so little she could tell them. Still, they seemed relieved that she had regained consciousness.
“That’s a good sign, right?” Finn Conran, a friend of Julie’s, asked. “No serious head injury?”
“No, nothing like that. But she’ll be in the hospital a while.”
That thought was so depressing. Jenny would be over at the hospital most of the time, too. Their dorm room was going to seem so empty.
I’ll just go out a lot, Alex decided. I’ll visit them at the hospital, and I’ll go to football games and to the library and I’ll hang out in other people’s rooms. Anything to avoid being in our room by myself. Jenny won’t be lying on the floor with her glasses on, studying, and Julie won’t be sitting on her bed practicing guitar and talking about Gabe or yammering away on the telephone for hours. It won’t be the same.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
Still, at least Gabe was going to be able to walk again. The night before, it had looked like maybe he wouldn’t be able to. He’d probably even play football again, once his legs had healed.
Maybe Julie would be that lucky, too.
After her shower, Jenny collapsed on her bed and was asleep in minutes.
Alex covered her with a blanket, and then left for her afternoon classes.
She was amazed to find that, except for a few leftover reminders of the storm—broken branches, stray sheets of newspaper clinging to the stadium fence, a cracked window at Dennison Memorial Library—the campus looked the same. Same fountain on the Commons, same Quad—the four buildings joined together—same students hurrying back and forth across campus, same huge old trees and tall metal lampposts lining the campus walkways, same old red brick or buff-colored stone buildings, a few covered with a network of ivy.
Nothing seemed different.
But everything was different.
It was just last night, Alex thought in awe…just last night that we were in Vinnie’s and everything was fine, and I was annoyed that everyone liked that stupid fortune-telling booth, and we ate, and then the storm hit…
And everything changed.
After her afternoon classes, Alex had two hours scheduled at WKSM, the campus radio station, where she worked as a DJ. She didn’t wan
t to go. What she wanted to do was go home and slide under the covers and sleep until Julie was fully recovered and life was back to the way it had been before the storm.
But if she didn’t show up, whoever had the shift ahead of her would be stuck doing double duty. Not fair.
Maybe sitting in the quiet, peaceful booth, taking requests would cheer her up. “I could use cheering up,” she murmured, and hurried across campus toward the tower.
Built of buff-colored stone, topped by a set of bells that occasionally played a melody, the tall, narrow tower was twenty stories high; Besides the radio station on the eighteenth floor, it housed offices, a barber shop, the bookstore, a candy shop, and a dry cleaners. A few floors had observation decks equipped with heavy-duty telescopes for studying the heavens.
The office was crowded when she arrived. Kyle was in the soundproof booth, reading sports news. Bennett, back on crutches, and Marty, his nose buried in a stack of papers Alex guessed was the sociology speech, lounged on chairs in the outer office. Jenny, without makeup, her hair yanked away from her face and carelessly fastened with a rubber band, sat behind the station manager’s desk.
“You didn’t sleep very long,” Alex said as she entered the office.
Jenny shrugged. “Couldn’t. I came to see if any of these guys wanted to go to the hospital with me. I called, and Julie’s allowed to have visitors. She won’t want to see everyone, but I’m sure she’d want to see you guys.”
The sign on the desk said ROBERT Q PARKER, HI, MANAGER, but it lied. Parker had recently been replaced by a cheerful sophomore named Beth Lacey. Alex didn’t know much about him, just that he was a “big man on campus,” who liked to play around and treated women like dirt. Alex had always avoided him, and she was glad when Beth had taken over. Everyone liked Beth a lot, and the station seemed to be running smoothly under her care.
Marty stood up. “Ready, Jen?”
She nodded, and left the chair.
“Meet us at Vinnie’s later?” Marty asked Alex as she opened the door to the booth.
“Oh, pizza again?” Alex groaned. The truth was, she didn’t feel up to returning to the place where everything had started, not this soon.
