Nia turned to Callie. “Hal’s brilliant plan is that we join costume crew to work on Amanda’s box during rehearsals.”
Callie looked to me to confirm what Nia had just said, and I nodded. Then she turned to Nia. “And you object?”
“Don’t you?” Nia was indignant.
Callie shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like he’s asking me to sew a button on his shirt or anything.”
“Oh, let me be the first to assure you both that no one would wear a shirt on which I’d sewn a button.” Nia gestured at the bright brass buttons that closed the short red sweater she was wearing. “Notice what you can accomplish by calling in a professional.”
“That’s what my mom says about cooking!” I agreed, and just at that minute, Mrs. Leong poked her head out of the main office door.
She squinted at us, like she doubted we were who she thought we were. “I was sure I’d have to go looking for the three of you, and here you are.” Was this a bad thing? Had Officer Marciano made a return trip? I had a second to feel my neck tightening with anxiety before she announced, “Callie, Hal, Nia, I have a delivery here for the three of you.”
We looked at one another. What the—
“Amanda,” Nia whispered.
My heart hammering in my chest, I followed the girls into the main office. On the counter in front of Mrs. Leong’s desk was the pink-wrapped package the delivery guy had been carrying. Stapled to it was a plain purple envelope with HAL BENNETT, CALLIE LEARY, NIA RIVERA written across the front in Amanda’s distinctive capital letters.
The last message she’d given the three of us together had been the postcard she’d ripped into sections and slipped into our lockers two Saturdays ago while we were sitting in detention. It was all I could do not to grab the package, hug it to my chest, and sprint to safety.
Luckily, Callie got to the package first. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Leong,” she said, not reaching for it. Her voice was calm, as if there were nothing the least bit remarkable about our receiving a package at Endeavor.
Mrs. Leong was not so casual. Biting her lip, she put one hand on the package and the other on the counter. “Students don’t normally receive deliveries at school. I’m not sure if . . .” She briefly glanced toward the vice principal’s door, like she’d forgotten she couldn’t ask Mr. Thornhill about the proper protocol in this situation.
Smiling from ear to ear, Callie leaned toward Mrs. Leong and whispered something in her ear. As she listened to Callie, Mrs. Leong broke out into a wide grin, something I’d never seen her do before.
“Really?” she asked.
Callie nodded and shrugged as if to say, Aw shucks.
Mrs. Leong handed her the package, then looked at me and Nia as if she wished she could hug us to her. “Well, let me just say that you three are extremely sweet.”
Nia tried to hide her confusion behind an uncomfortable-looking smile-grimace combo platter, and I’m sure my expression wasn’t much more natural. Fortunately, Mrs. Leong took our reactions as embarrassment rather than bewilderment.
“Let me know what she says,” Mrs. Leong ordered.
“Oh, I will,” Callie assured her, and a second later we were on the other side of the office door, Endeavor’s end-of-day chaos surrounding us.
As Nia struggled to rip the purple envelope from the package, I asked Callie what she’d told Mrs. Leong.
“Oh, you know, just that Ms. Garner was having a hard time and we’d agreed to join the costume crew and do set design and we’d ordered her a little present to let her know how confident we were that the play’s going to be a hit.” She grinned with pleasure at her own subterfuge.
“Nice,” I told her.
“My god,” Nia muttered, teeth clenched as she pulled at the card, “this is, like, nailed on.”
“The trick to a good lie is to keep it as close to the truth as possible,” Callie explained, shouting to be heard over the crowd.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I shouted back.
“Got it!”
Callie and I were huddled on either side of her, and as Nia slipped the card from the envelope, I didn’t need psychic abilities to know how desperate we all were to see what it would say.
But what it said was . . . nothing.
There was the familiar coyote stamp in the top left-hand corner, but not a word written on the card. Nia flipped it over, then back, like maybe she’d missed some writing at first glance.
You could practically hear our disappointment.
“What the—” Nia started, but Callie interrupted her.
“Inside.”
“What?” asked Nia.
“The message. It’s inside.”
Nia slapped her forehead, and as Callie held the package, the two of us shredded the nauseatingly bright pink paper.
I don’t know what I’d expected to find inside, but it definitely wasn’t the tacky FTD bouquet-in-a-basket that lay within. The flowers were so horrible they were like an affront to flowers everywhere—brightly dyed blue daisies, pink chrysanthemums, and some other orange flower I didn’t recognize. In the middle of the floral abomination was a plastic sign that read get well soon in gold script.
It was like Amanda had gone out of her way to pick the ugliest bouquet in the world.
The three of us studied the arrangement, not speaking. Finally, Nia broke the silence.
“That’s it?” she asked, and her eyes flashed angrily. “A get-well-soon bouquet.”
“An ugly get-well-soon bouquet,” Callie corrected her.
“Well, maybe the idea is the flowers are so repulsive they’ll make you sick enough to need a get-well bouquet.” Nia’s voice was harsh with disappointment.
It was true—this was a relentlessly awful bouquet. I thought back to the delicate daisy chain Amanda had woven that morning in the woods. Would the person who made that have chosen such a revolting display? Then again, the card and the handwriting meant it was clearly from her.
Nia took a step back, folded her arms, and frowned at the flowers.
“I’m going to say something.”
“Okay,” said Callie.
“And it’s going to sound crazy,” she continued.
“Which would make it different from most of what we say to each other because . . . ?” I offered.
“This is a message.” Nia was still staring at the depressing basket of flowers.
“Now you sound like me,” I observed.
Nia looked over the flowers at me and raised an eyebrow, then made the plunge. “Who do we know who’s sick?”
Callie shook her head slowly. “No one.”
Nia corrected herself. “I don’t mean sick like ill. I mean sick like in the hospital.”
The perfect rightness of Nia’s point was so powerful it hit me like a punch. This bouquet was a caricature. It was a caricature of the kind of bouquets people send to people who are in the hospital. Which meant . . .
“Thornhill,” Callie and I whispered at the same time. We both stared at Nia, wide-eyed with amazement.
“Thornhill,” she echoed, nodding her approval of our answer. “Amanda wants us to pay a visit to Thornhill.”
Chapter 8
There’s lying by omission and lying by commission, and even though I’m pretty sure the latter is worse, when I called my mom and told her I had agreed to help Ms. Garner with the sets, there was cold comfort in the fact that I was actually doing that, just not at this particular moment. True, I never actually uttered the sentence, The reason I am not coming directly home after school is because I am staying late to help with set design, but that was the kind of hair-splitting that carried more weight in a court of law than it would in the court of Katharine Bennett. The sheepish look on Nia’s face after she slapped her phone shut said she felt totally shifty about playing fast and loose with the truth, too.
We walked to the bike racks in guilty silence. “It’s all in the service of the greater good,” Callie assured us as we unlocked
our bikes.
“The end justifies the means,” Nia agreed, throwing one leg over her bike.
Suddenly I remembered something Amanda had once quoted to me. “Gandhi said, ‘We must take care of the means and the ends will take care of themselves.’”
Neither Nia nor Callie said anything for a minute, and then Callie said flatly, “Yeah, but remember what happened to him?”
I thought of Gandhi’s assassination. “Good point,” I acknowledged. “Onward!”
And we set off in our now-familiar single-file line.
Orion General Hospital is a surprisingly big medical complex for such a small town, and it took us a while to find the main entrance even following the instructions of the signs posted everywhere. We locked up our bikes at the crowded bike rack just outside the enormous, slowly revolving door, and Callie was about to step into it when I put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back.
“Wait a sec,” I said.
She turned to me, a confused look on her face.
“I think we need some kind of story about why we’re here.” For a minute, I wondered if I was being paranoid, but then I thought about why Thornhill was here.
Probably I wasn’t being paranoid enough.
“Let’s say we’re his kids,” Nia suggested. “And we’re bringing him this.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out the bouquet, which was only slightly the worse for wear.
“It’s not a total lie,” Callie said. “We are his kids.”
“But we’re not his children,” I pointed out.
“A minor discrepancy,” Nia assured me, and a second later, we’d swished through the revolving door and into the overheated, antiseptic-smelling lobby.
Our story served us well on the first floor, where a tired-looking woman with crispy red curls issued us passes that read nia thornhill, callie thornhill, and hal thornhill. Even though it was just a sticker, wearing the name tag made me feel like a different person, as if I really were Vice Principal Thornhill’s son. I wondered what Hal Thornhill was like. Did he win spelling bees? Have to serve detention when he missed his curfew? I imagined him bouncing a quarter on his bed after he made it, then nodding with satisfaction at the tightly pulled bedspread.
“So, what, are we triplets?” asked Callie as we rode up to his floor in the slow-moving elevator. I could tell from her voice that she was nervous, and I reached over to take her hand. Her warm fingers slid easily into mine and she gave me a gentle squeeze that I read as Thanks.
“If we get to the point where they want to know our birth order, we’ve got bigger troubles than whether or not we’re triplets,” Nia answered.
The number on the panel switched from two to three and the elevator gave a small ding as it stopped. A second later, the doors slid open and we were looking down a corridor at a wall with a sign that read critical care unit with an arrow beneath it pointing straight ahead. My mom, who’s addicted to this show about doctors so busy flirting with one another and making witty, snappy comebacks that they can barely find the time to save lives, would have known whether critical care was better or worse than intensive care. To my ears, critical and intensive both sounded pretty awful.
Nia put her hand on my arm and I looked over at her as the three of us stepped into the corridor. “I just want to make one thing clear, okay?” she asked. Her voice was deadly serious.
Callie and I nodded.
“If it should come to it,” she said, pointing at her chest, “I’m the oldest.” She let go of my arm and started walking down the corridor, adding, “I am sooo tired of being someone’s little sister, you have no idea,” before she pushed through a pair of swinging doors marked CRITICAL CARE UNIT in six-inch-high letters.
On the other side of the doors was a large open area with numbered doors leading off it. Ahead of us was a circular nurses’ station with no nurses. The space was hushed, only the occasional beep or whir of a machine. Immediately to our left was room 334, the name ATWOOD, C. on a small tag next to the room number. The next room was 333, and this one had two names, KNIGHT, E. and FELTZ, L. Our passes said THORNHILL, R. CRIT CARE, 330, and I was starting to think maybe we’d just be able to walk into Thornhill’s room without having to utter the lie “our dad” again when a nurse walking at a brisk pace emerged from a room on the other side of the waiting area.
She couldn’t have been much older than we were, and she looked more like an Endeavor cheerleader than a medical professional. Her blond ponytail was high up on the back of her head, and when she saw the three of us standing there, she gave us a bright smile.
“Well, hello there!” Her voice was chipper. There would have been nothing surprising to me if she’d added, Give me an E! and waved a pair of pom-poms madly in the air.
My mom’s always saying people are like books and you can’t judge by the cover, but come on—if this woman was the only thing between us and Vice Principal Thornhill, we were so at his bedside.
“Hi,” I said, smiling at her.
“Hi!” she sang back, her white-toothed smile growing, if possible, even wider. “Can I help you? Oh, that is just the nicest bouquet.”
I could practically hear Nia smirking beside me. “We’re here to see our dad,” Callie said.
The woman’s blue eyes widened with sympathy. “Now, aren’t you three just the sweetest?” She squeezed her shoulders and face with pleasure at our sense of filial responsibility. “Tell me, honey, what’s your dad’s name?”
I wasn’t sure if I was the honey she was referring to, but I answered anyway. “Mister—” I began, but Nia cut me off.
“Roger Thornhill,” she said, taking the flowers from Callie and holding them out as evidence of our good intentions.
For a second it seemed to me that something changed behind the sympathetic mask the nurse’s face had become, and I wondered if Mr. Thornhill might be sicker than we’d thought. Maybe he was even . . . But then she was walking over to the nurses’ station, murmuring, “Let me just make sure now’s a good time.” She picked up a phone and dialed it, speaking softly into the receiver. She listened briefly, then hung up and came over to where we were standing.
“Have a seat,” she urged, still grinning broadly. Then she came over and stood so close to us that for a second I had the crazy idea that she was going to pull us into a group hug. Instead, she kind of urged us backward until we were up against a row of seats lining the wall between rooms 333 and 334. The back of one of the plastic chairs pressed into my calf, and without actually deciding to, I found myself sitting down. Next to my head was a clear plastic box, and when I turned to look at it, I saw it was emblazoned with the words in case of emergency, lift cover, press button. Beneath the plastic was a red button, and I wondered with a shudder what kind of emergency would be so dire you’d need more help than you could find in the Critical Care Unit.
The nurse went back to her station, and I realized that once again, Nia, Callie, and I were sitting together and waiting to see Mr. Thornhill. I thought of the expression Amanda loved to quote: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The nurse busied herself behind the counter that hid the surface of the desk from us. Her eyes never once looked in our direction, and at first I thought she was just very engrossed in her work, but after a few minutes her focus started to seem . . . unnatural somehow. Like she wasn’t not looking at us so much as she was trying not to look at us. I told myself I was being crazy. She was a nurse. She probably had a dozen people to keep alive. Surely this woman had more important things to think about than three high school kids waiting to see their “father.”
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something weird was going on. I glanced over at Callie and Nia, but it was hard to know if the tense expressions on their faces were the result of anything more than the fact that we’d just lied our way into a hospital to see a man who may have been attacked by the very people who caused our friend to go on the
lam.
Slowly, slowly, not letting on to either of them what I was doing and keeping my movements so tiny I was sure they must be imperceptible, I began to get to my feet.
Neither Callie nor Nia noticed my movement, but no sooner had I lifted my butt off the chair than the nurse, who’d ostensibly been engrossed in her typing, shot to her feet. “Can I help you with something?” Her smile was as broad as ever, but something about it suddenly felt less enthusiastic and more . . . menacing than it had earlier. Her hand, I saw, was back on the phone and I started to get a very, very bad feeling about having judged this particular book by its peppy cover.
“You know, maybe now’s not the best time to see him,” I said. I put my hand under Nia’s elbow and practically lifted her to her feet.
And then three things happened simultaneously.
“What are you—” Nia demanded, nearly dropping the flowers as she pulled her arm away.
“You have a seat now!” snapped the nurse, lifting the receiver to her ear.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Thornhill children,” said a voice, and we turned to see that a doctor had just walked through the doors we’d come in earlier.
And with him was a hospital guard.
Chapter 9
“Here they are, Dr. Plummer,” said the nurse, and she clapped her hands together and gave a tiny jump of excitement.
“Thank you so much,” said the doctor, and he came over to the three of us. He was a small man, maybe five six or so, with grayish-blond hair and glasses. Between his lab coat, the manila folder he held tucked under his arm, his pale hair, and his silver-rimmed glasses, he gave an impression of being almost completely white; I had the feeling I could pass him in a corridor and not even realize there was anyone there.
“So, you’ve come to see your father.” His voice was chilly but he grinned broadly, as if there was nothing he liked more than meeting the families of patients in the critical care ward.
Nia stood up. “Are you his doctor?” she non-answered.
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