Then one night, she slipped into my room, closing the door softly behind her. She stood with her back against the door and looked like she had won the lottery. Her face was that bright, her eyes seemed full of fireflies.
“We’re leavin’ this trap tomorrow night,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. . . .
Teal
As soon as our English teacher, Mr. Croft, took off his sports jacket and draped it over his desk chair in front of the classroom, I knew I was going to laugh. The laughter rose in my chest in waves, rolling freely upward. Mr. Croft turned to write the first grammar exercise sentence on the board, and I saw his shirt partially out of his pants. It really wasn’t anything all that unusual. He was not a very neat dresser. However, everything had struck me as humorous this morning, from the security guard at the front entrance looking at me with grouchy, suspicious eyes, to the snob birds in the bathroom who nearly exploded with shock when I plucked my silver flask out of my purse and took a sip.
“What’s that?” Evette Heckman asked. “Orange juice and vodka,” I replied, smiled, and drank some more. When I offered it to them, they fled as if I was offering them a drink of poison.
In class my laugh came out with a sound that resembled someone spitting up a drink first, and then I went into the giggles. Mr. Croft turned with confusion on his face and raked the room with his eyes, finally settling on me. His grimace of bewilderment changed to a smirk of annoyance, and that made me laugh even harder.
I knew the vodka I had taken from my parents’ bar to mix with the orange juice had most to do with my inability to contain myself. This wasn’t the first time, and something told me it wasn’t going to be the last, no matter what happened this particular morning.
“What do you find so funny, Miss Sommers?” Mr. Croft asked. “Surely not restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, although the results of your quiz yesterday might suggest you’re not taking this very seriously.”
Everyone’s eyes were on me. Some of the snob birds looked angrier than Mr. Croft, probably to win favor or maybe because they really did think I was interrupting their precious private-school educations. The idea was, if you paid more for it, you would take it more seriously. At least, that was the theory my parents believed or, should I say, hoped was true, especially for me. I had all but failed tenth grade the year before in public school. I had been suspended three times there and put in detention so often, there was a joke that I would get a degree in it. After I was caught vandalizing the girls’ room, which cost my father nearly a thousand dollars, my parents thought a strategic retreat to a private school would be the solution. I would be less apt to be influenced by bad seeds. The truth was, I was the one doing the influencing.
Mr. Croft brought his hands to his wide waist and glared at me. His nostrils were as big as a cow’s when they flared. He turned his lips inward, outlining his mouth in two thin white lines of rage, and clenched his teeth.
“Well?” he demanded, speaking through the wall of cigarette-stained enamel.
I laughed harder. I couldn’t help it, even though my stomach was hurting and I was gasping for breath.
He sighed.
“I think it’s best you get up and go to the principal’s office, Miss Sommers,” he said in a tighter voice.
I continued to laugh.
“Teal Sommers!” he screamed, stepping toward me. “Get up and get out this minute.”
He pointed at the door so vigorously and sharply, the button on his cuff undid and his sleeve sagged like a torn curtain. Someone gasped, but that just widened my idiotic grin. He saw what happened and lowered his arm, pointing more gracefully with the other arm and hand toward the door.
“Go. I will intercom the office to let Mr. Bloomberg know you are coming,” he assured me.
I caught my breath and let my head fall back a moment. I was looking up at the ceiling, watching the lines of the tiles wiggling. Mr. Croft walked all the way down the aisle to my desk. By this time his rage was building like milk boiling in a pot. Any moment he might seize my arm and pull me out of my seat, I thought.
“What is wrong with you, young lady?”
“Smell her breath,” one of the snob birds cried out. I wasn’t positive, but I thought it was most likely Ainsley Winslow. Always full of herself, she’d hated me from the moment I told her that her nose job was poorly done, was too pointed, and made her resemble a chicken.
Mr. Croft looked in her direction and then down at me with more intense scrutiny.
“Is that true, Teal? Have you drunk something you shouldn’t?”
“No, sir,” I said, and then I covered my mouth with both of my hands quickly because my stomach was starting to send up more than laughter. It took two hard swallows to keep it down, my eyes bulging with the effort.
“Go!” he commanded with a sense of panic as well as anger in his voice.
I rose much too quickly and awkwardly and fell against him. He jumped back as if I was on fire. As fast as I could, I scooped up my books and charged toward the door. Behind me I heard the rest of the classroom laughing. I fumbled with the knob and went out, closing the door behind me. The churning in my stomach stopped for a moment, but the corridor seemed to turn on its side and then right itself. I hiccuped so loudly, the sound bounced off the walls, echoing all the way to the end of the corridor. With one hand against the wall to steady myself, I started down the shiny-tiled floor. . . .
Phoebe
“Well, she’s gone,” Daddy announced at my bedroom door. “Your mother has really gone.”
I turned slightly in bed and grunted, thinking, Why did he have to wake me so early just to tell me that? Then, I peered at him through the slits of my barely opened eyes. He stood in my bedroom doorway, his head bowed and his hands on his hips. He was already dressed for work, wearing his gray suit and tie, looking as perfectly put together as a storefront manikin, as Mama would say.
“Right, Daddy, she’s gone,” I said, and pulled the cover over my head.
“No,” he said, raising his voice. “I mean it. This time she’s really gone, Phoebe.”
I lowered the blanket again.
“What are you talking about, Daddy? She’s really gone? Like this is the first morning you woke up and realized she didn’t come home all night?”
In the beginning they would have loud arguments about that, Mama crying that he didn’t consider how hard she worked and how she needed time to unwind. After a while Daddy gave up complaining and just ignored it, which was usually how he handled every crisis between them.
My mother worked as a waitress in a small jazz joint. Most of the time she spent what she made right there, or at least, that was what she claimed. Either that or she needed this and that for work: better shoes, nicer clothes, beautifying to make better tips. Whatever excuse she came up with, Daddy accepted.
With Daddy on the road selling tools to garages all around the Atlanta, Georgia, area, I was often home alone most of the night. Lately, he had to go even farther to bring in as much income as he had before. Because of that, he often had to sleep in a motel and I’d be alone all night, not realizing until morning that Mama hadn’t come home.
“She didn’t leave a goodbye letter for either you or me, but she’s gone! She packed most of her things and took off.”
I stared at him a moment and then sat up in bed. I was wearing one of his pajama tops, which was something I had done since I was four and was still doing at sixteen.
“What things? Her clothes?”
“That’s what I said.”
That was something she hadn’t ever done, I thought. I ran my fingers through my hair before getting up and marching past him to his and Mama’s bedroom.
Her closet door was wide open, and there were dozens of empty hangers dangling. Some of her less cherished garments had been tossed to the floor. There was only one pair of old shoes in the shoe rack. Now that the closet was almost empty, the gobs of dust were more visible. I stared at it and shook my head.
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“She took all that and left,” I said in amazement, mostly to myself. Daddy was standing right beside me.
Mama was really on a fling this time. I was sure it was something she had just decided to do on the spur of the moment. She hadn’t given me any hints. I think I felt more betrayed than Daddy, not that Mama and I were all that close these days. She didn’t like being reminded she had a sixteen-year-old daughter. Instead, she preferred pretending she wasn’t much older than that herself, especially in front of men. I was absolutely forbidden to go to the club to see her when she was working, and she warned me that if I ever did, she would act like she didn’t know who I was.
“All her cosmetics, too,” Daddy said, nodding at their bathroom. The counter had nothing on it, no jars of her creams, no shampoos, nothing.
“Wow,” I said. “I guess she did take off for a while.”
“What time did you get home last night that you didn’t even know it, Phoebe, and didn’t even hear her do all this?” he asked. “I’m sure she wasn’t alone,” he added in a lower voice.
Anger didn’t darken his ebony eyes as much as it turned them into cold black marble.
“I was home early, but she was still at work and I was so tired I went right to sleep,” I lied.
Once again I had violated my curfew and come home very late, but I just assumed she was still at the club. I didn’t go to her room to look for her, and if I had and had woken her, she would have ripped into me good. The gin I had drunk at Toby Powell’s house practically put me into a coma anyway. I didn’t even hear my dreams. . . .
Learn the dark secrets of the Logan Family: • MELODY • HEART SONG • UNFINISHED SYMPHONY MUSIC IN THE NIGHT • OLIVIA
Experience the runaway chills of the Orphans miniseries: BUTTERFLY • CRYSTAL BROOKE • RA VEN • RUN A WAYS
Feel the enticing embrace of the Wildflowers miniseries: MISTY • STAR • JADE • CAT • INTO THE GARDEN
Thrill to the mysteries of the Hudson series: RAIN • LIGHTNING STRIKES • EYE OF THE STORM THE END OF THE RAINBOW
Step into the spotlight with the Shooting Stars: CINNAMON • ICE • ROSE • HONEY • FALLING STARS
Live the life of the rich and famous in the De Beers series: WILLOW’ WICKED FOREST• TWISTED ROOTS INTO THE WOODS
Unlock the secrets inside a diary from Willow’s family in HIDDEN LEAVES, which includes the prequel DARK SEED
Take a walk on the wild side in BROKEN WINGS, and live on the edge with MIDNIGHT FLIGHT
Uncover the double-edged secrets of the Gemini series, with CELESTE, BLACK CAT, and CHILD OF DARKNESS
Download V.C. Andrews’ long-awaited literary experiment: THE GODS OF GREEN MOUNTAIN
And look for GIRL IN THE SHADOWS, the next daring novel featuring April Taylor from APRIL SHADOWS—coming soon!
Lightning Strikes Page 32
