Adam shook his head. “Man, that’s rough. I’m sorry.”
“Me too. And maybe they’ll stay together, and maybe they won’t. But either way, I don’t want to be there right now. They’re working so hard to ignore each other that they don’t really notice me.”
“And your friends? You still on the outs with them?”
Sammi swallowed. The situation with her parents truly was bothering her, but she’d brought it up to avoid having to talk about the wreckage of her relationship with all four of her best friends.
She nodded. “Yeah. I can’t really talk to them.”
“So I’m your basic distraction, someone to take your mind off of your troubles?”
Horrified, Sammi looked at him. “No, why would you say that?”
“No?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.
Confused, she shrugged. “I don’t…Maybe? A little? But you make it sound so cold, and it’s not like that.”
“I don’t know. I kind of like the idea of being your distraction.”
They passed by Abercrombie, and he studied the window displays. Sammi tugged on his hand to get his attention.
“Was that supposed to be romantic, or just sexual innuendo?”
“Both.”
Sammi rolled her eyes. “Boys.”
Some guys she knew would have bristled at being called a boy. Adam only grinned and walked on beside her. She had been concerned that he would push her to talk more about the situation with her parents, but he seemed content to let her decide how much, if any, she wanted to discuss. They’d only seen each other in person three times, but they’d texted and talked often enough that it seemed much more than that. She liked him, a lot. Liked being with him.
And he was a very cute distraction.
They wandered into the bookstore, where Sammi perused the mystery shelves and Adam led her through the science fiction section. She told him about Cruel and Unusual Books in Covington, and he confessed he’d never been through the front door. She much preferred it to any of the big stores. The chains had a better selection, but the people at Cruel and Unusual knew her, and knew what she liked. Sammi liked the intimacy of the place.
“Coffee?” Adam asked.
“We haven’t had dinner yet.”
“Is there some kind of rule nobody told me about?”
Sammi pushed him toward the café in the front corner of the store. “Mochaccino, then. Dessert before dinner.”
While they were in line at the café, Sammi glanced past Adam and was stunned to see Caryn and Katsuko come into the store. If he hadn’t been looking up at the menu board at that moment, he could not have failed to notice the way she stiffened at the sight of them.
Sammi stood beside Adam, standing in his shadow, hiding from them. As they ordered she kept stealing glimpses at them as they moved through the music and DVD section. The machine that whipped her mochaccino whined like a dentist’s drill.
Adam said something, but the words didn’t filter into her head.
“Sounds good,” she said, with no idea what she’d agreed to.
He received his coffee and went over to the small side-bar to pour cream and sugar into the cup. When they handed Sammi her mochaccino, she went and stood behind him.
Over Adam’s shoulder, she watched as Katsuko and Caryn browsed a shelf of TV series boxed sets on DVD. The expensive ones were all locked away in a glass case, but this stuff was right out in the open. As Sammi looked on, the two girls turned toward one another, maybe to shield their actions from the view of cameras. But Sammi could see between them. Katsuko stripped the plastic from the DVD box, opened it, popped out all four discs, and handed them to Caryn, who pushed them down the front of her pants.
Katsuko stuffed the plastic wrapping into the box and closed it, putting it back on the shelf. Whatever antitheft devices the store used, they’d be in the box or the wrapping.
They left the store, chatting casually, as though they hadn’t just committed a crime.
Sammi burned her tongue on the mochaccino and barely noticed.
9
O n Thursday morning, Sammi walked through the corridors of Covington High holding her breath. Every slam of a locker and raised voice made her blink or flinch. Her house had become colder and more silent than ever, but despite the noise and the usual frantic pace in the halls at school, it felt somehow the same to her. At home she always felt as if she was in the midst of a truce, and war might erupt at any moment. And that morning as school bells rang to move her from one class to the next, she kept watch for Marisol and the other Reinas with one eye, and Letty and the girls with the other.
Whatever mystery ailment they’d used as an excuse to skip school on Wednesday, they had obviously recovered from it. Sammi ran into T.Q. and Katsuko before homeroom and saw Letty in history class, and passed Caryn in the cafeteria. They pretended not to even notice her. Part of her exhaled in relief that they did not approach her, but still it hurt. People were nice to her. Sammi had gone back to floating from group to group, smiling and trying to fit in, but for the first time in her life she hated being a floater. She could never have predicted how lost she felt. She missed being a part of something, even if she no longer knew exactly what that something had been.
And those were the questions that haunted her through much of that morning. Who were these girls? Had they always been so cruel and malicious at heart, and she’d just never noticed it because they had accepted her before? Now that they had banished her from their lives, was she simply seeing their real faces for the first time?
The idea made her want to puke.
After lunch she stood at her locker, staring at the books piled inside and just drifting, wondering how it had all come to this. The metal felt cool under her touch. She tuned out the voices around her. Whatever happened with Las Reinas and the girls, Sammi decided she didn’t want to witness it. The hell with that idea. Maybe Letty and Caryn had earned an ass-kicking—maybe it would even be the shock they needed to stop acting like such bitches—but she didn’t want any part of it. Sammi had let her friends down, but their reaction had been totally out of proportion.
She tried to tell herself she never wanted anything to do with them again. Only a total loser would go crawling back, even if they’d ever take her back. So why couldn’t she hate them?
Lost in thought, just staring into her locker, she didn’t notice Ken Nguyen come up beside her until he tapped her on the arm and repeated her name. Sammi blinked and looked at him.
“Hey. Are you feeling all right?”
“Sorry. Just drifting. What’s up?”
Ken shrugged. “Well, first off, the bell rang. Didn’t look like you heard it.”
“I’m totally spaced today, but wow. I didn’t think I was that far gone. Gonna have to go to bed early tonight.”
Sammi knew she didn’t sound at all convincing, that Ken had to realize she was blowing off his concern. She only hoped he realized that she appreciated it, even if she wasn’t going to talk about her troubles.
“Maybe you should take a nap in psych.”
She smiled. “I don’t think that would go over very well.”
“Ah, you’re fine. You have my permission.”
Sammi laughed softly. “Well, I’m sure that makes it okay, then.”
But even as she allowed her mood to lighten, she saw Ken’s smile falter. He glanced down.
“So, did you hear about your friend Simone?”
Her stomach gave a sick little twist. “What about her?”
“She’s saying Coach Kelleher assaulted her. Sexually, I mean.”
Her mouth dropped open and she stared up at him. “Are you kidding? Oh my God. He raped her?”
Ken glanced around, obviously nervous that someone would overhear him—a basketball player—gossiping about the accusations against his coach. “Not quite. She’s basically saying he seduced her or whatever. How he’s supposed to have gotten her alone, I have no idea, but that’s what she’s claiming.
”
Ice raced through Sammi’s veins. She studied Ken. “You don’t believe her?”
“I sure as hell don’t want to,” he said, and she could see in his eyes the way the news was tearing at him. “I mean, you have an image of somebody, y’know? Coach is…well, he’s Coach. I can’t imagine him doing something like that, but I guess you never really know what’s going on inside somebody else’s head.”
Sammi thought about the girls and shook her head. “You really don’t. But think about it. T.Q.? Seriously? I’ve got some issues with her right now, but there’s no way she would make something like that up.”
A flurry of thoughts went through her mind. After the way her friends had behaved lately, the one who’d surprised her the most was T.Q. Caryn had always needed a little anger management, and Katsuko could be so damn superior. But T.Q. had always been so quiet and gentle and kind. Maybe this was the piece of the puzzle Sammi’d been missing. Of them all, T.Q. was the most inexperienced with boys. The girl was totally naïve.
Or she had been.
“God, I’ve got to talk to her. I can’t imagine how she must feel.”
Ken dropped his gaze a moment and sighed, looking up at her. “I know you’re probably right. I guess I’ve just been hoping it would turn out to be bullshit. Not that it would matter. It’s probably already too late for Coach. The school suspended him this morning, while they investigate, apparently. But once word gets out that he’s been accused, the damage is done.”
He touched her arm again. “I’ll see you later, Sam. I’ve gotta get to class.”
“Me too.”
As she pulled out her books for Intro to Psych, Ken went off along the hall and left her to ruminate on the news. She’d already been feeling anxious and a little nauseated, but now it grew much worse. The thought of what T.Q. had gone through sickened her. Despite the trouble between them, she knew she had to reach out to her friend.
All through psych class Sammi felt like she was in a fog. The teacher’s voice droned into gibberish like all the adults in the Charlie Brown holiday specials. By the time the bell rang, she’d retained nothing from the class except the assignment the teacher had given for the next class—which wasn’t until Monday, thankfully.
The rest of her day consisted of a study hall and then math, which allowed her to put some strategy to use. Why bother doing her trig homework at home when she could do it right before class? That strategy had worked in the past, but somehow she had a feeling it would be very difficult to focus today.
And that was before she heard Letty’s voice in the stairwell.
The stairs were packed between classes, flowing in both directions. Sammi reached the second floor and turned to keep going up to the third, where she’d have study hall in Ms. Ostergaard’s room. But as she started up the stairs she heard that familiar, flirtatious laugh, and looked up to see Letty and Katsuko standing next to the window on the landing between the second and third floors.
“Come on, Josh, stick around. Free show,” Letty said to a skinny sophomore passing by.
The kid blushed deeply, head hanging in humiliation. Sammi recognized him right off as a boy who’d had an enormous crush on Letty the previous year, and who’d been teased mercilessly by his friends when they learned she was gay. From the look of it, Sammi had to assume the taunting had started earlier, maybe in the third floor hallway. But now Letty and Katsuko had stepped aside on the landing to let Josh pass.
Letty wore a belly shirt and a daringly short skirt with striped stockings that came up to her thighs, drawing even more attention to the inches of bare leg between the top of the stocking and the hem of her skirt. Katsuko had probably come to school that day with a shirt underneath the gray vest she wore, but if so, she had shed the garment. Her pants rode so low that her hips barely kept them from falling down, and if she wore underwear, it must have been so tiny it didn’t show. On top, all she had on was the vest, which left little to the imagination.
Sammi froze on the steps and stared at them in disbelief. She wasn’t a prude. In fact, Letty and Katsuko had both given her a hard time more than once about the way she dressed. But the line between attention whore and just plain whore could be perilously thin, and to her mind it was all about how you presented yourself.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
Someone jostled her and she dropped her books. Sammi swore and knelt to pick them up as the flow of traffic on the stairs parted and swept around her.
“Come on, Josh,” Letty pleaded as the red-faced sophomore continued down the stairs. “I know you want some. You know you want some.”
Sammi bristled with disgust. When she had snatched up her books, she saw that Josh had continued down the stairs without reaction.
“Hey, Josh!” Katsuko shouted.
All conversation on the stairs stopped. People slowed down. There must have been thirty or forty kids who turned to look, and that included Josh. He paused with his hand on the railing and sighed with frustration, then turned to look.
“You’re just not her type,” Katsuko said, with a lascivious grin.
Her hand slid out, and she pushed her fingers through Letty’s hair. Letty reached for Katsuko and caressed her face. Grinning, laughing, uttering little mews of pleasure, they pulled one another into a deep kiss, full of slippery tongues and roving hands.
Shock stole Sammi’s breath away. She blinked in astonishment. Everyone in the stairwell looked on in fascination. Some of the guys began to mutter appreciation. Even a couple of the girls began to hoot encouragement. A few turned up their noses in disgust at this display and started moving up or down the stairs again.
The kiss ended with the girls flushed and breathless. It might have been for Josh’s benefit—for Josh’s torment—but clearly they had enjoyed themselves.
Sammi glanced at Josh as he started down the stairs again. He’d been blushing before, but now had turned ghostly pale, his humiliation complete.
The traffic on the stairs started to move again.
When Sammi passed Letty and Katsuko on the landing, they were still hanging on each other, snickering softly and sighing with amusement, as though it had been the funniest thing they’d ever seen. They stole glances at one another that said they were tempted to start in again. Sammi had never had a problem with Letty’s sexuality, and if Letty and Katsuko wanted to be together, she would have been happier for them than anyone. But if their romance came in the form of someone else’s torture, that was just sick.
“You two are just evil,” Sammi said as she passed.
Katsuko and Letty looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Sammi imagined she could still hear them all the way to study hall.
For that entire period, she accomplished nothing. Sammi sat in Ms. Ostergaard’s room as if she had gone catatonic, doodling in a notebook or staring out the window, trying and failing to make sense of it all. When the bell rang and she shuffled off to trigonometry, she had not even opened the book, never mind done the homework. She barely noticed the teacher’s displeasure and paid little attention.
For the first time, all her guilt had vanished. Whatever had happened to her friends, it had nothing to do with her. But she worried about them now. What kind of trauma would cause people to change so dramatically? Sammi wondered if they’d all started using drugs, but could not imagine where they would have come into possession of something that could screw them up so completely.
Haunted, she managed somehow to scribble down the night’s assignment and then followed the peal of the school bell out into the hallway. It echoed out there, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
As she hefted her backpack and fell into the current of students leaving school, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. Sammi pulled it out and was relieved to see she had a text message from Anna Dubrowski.
Hey. If u aren’t doing anything 2mrw nite, want to come to the b-ball game with us?
For the first time that day, Sammi f
elt three-dimensional. The whole world had seemed gray to her, like some kind of ghost world or the landscape of a dream. Now Anna’s invitation woke her up, reminded her that there was more to life than Las Reinas and her freakish friends.
Love to, she texted back. Time?
7:30. We’ll save u a seat.
Sammi managed a smile as she went down the central staircase to the main exit. After last night, the last thing she wanted to do was dump more of her stress on Cute Adam—especially if she hoped to keep him around. But having an excuse to get out of her house Friday night gave her a happy feeling.
Lost in her own thoughts, she nearly collided with T.Q. as she went out the front door. The girl glanced at her, and Sammi was surprised to see no emotion at all on T.Q.’s face. The redhead didn’t look happy to see her, but neither did she scowl or sneer the way Letty and the others had all been doing this week. That lack of emotion gave her the courage to speak up.
“Hey,” she said, going down the stairs beside T.Q. “You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Sammi lowered her voice. “I heard about that thing with the coach.”
They reached the bottom of the steps. T.Q. paused and gave her a look that said Sammi must be the stupidest girl on the face of the Earth. Then she smiled, and her eyes twinkled with mischief, as though she’d just told the world’s greatest joke.
T.Q. leaned in and whispered in Sammi’s ear. “He said I was too young for him. But I persuaded him to reconsider. He loved every minute of it, but after, he started feeling all guilty. Told me he’d been stupid, risking his family and his job like that. He begged me to understand. But I’m just not that understanding.”
She stood up again, glancing around for her bus. “It taught him a lesson, though. You can’t be halfway corrupt. If he hadn’t given in the first time, or if he hadn’t blown me off afterward, he’d be just fine right now. Instead, the bastard got what he deserved,” T.Q. said, and then she walked away, leaving Sammi staring after her.
“Oh my God,” Sammi whispered.
Poison Ink Page 11
