Her thoughts began to feel slippery, her body floating on a gentle ocean.
“I like your tattoo,” her mother said.
Sammi blinked and stared blearily at her. “What?”
“Well, not at first. When I thought it was real, it scared me, like I didn’t know you anymore. But then Kim, one of the nurses, told me it was a temporary one. It’s cute. I don’t know what possessed you to get one, but all in good fun, right?”
“Gonna sleep now,” Sammi thought she said.
“You go ahead. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Sammi felt the darkness closing in around her. A tremor of fear passed through her as she remembered the way it had swallowed her on Friday night as they’d beaten her unconscious.
I don’t know what possessed you.
She feared that she knew exactly what had possessed Letty and the girls. The image of those black tendrils traced all across Letty’s back loomed up in her mind again. Fueled by painkillers, her imagination made them slither under Letty’s skin like snakes.
As Sammi let herself drift off, she prayed the drugs would keep nightmares at bay.
The nightmares came, just as she’d feared. Instead of keeping them away, the drugs only made them worse. By Monday afternoon, Sammi had taken to asking the doctor to decrease the pain medication, preferring the deep ache and sleep deprivation to the images that lurked in her subconscious, waiting for her to fall prey to sleep.
Visitors came and went. T.Q.’s mother was the first of her former friends’ parents to come by. On Monday afternoon, she came in with a small mixed bouquet of flowers and stayed for less than fifteen minutes, made uncomfortable by the dreadfully awkward absence of her daughter. Caryn’s parents sent flowers—and signed their daughter’s name, which seemed almost obscene to Sammi, all things considered—but did not come by in person.
Adam did not send flowers. He did not call or come to visit. Sammi knew they had only met a couple of weeks earlier, but she had taken a fierce liking to the guy, and it hurt her that she hadn’t heard from him. She asked for her cell phone, which she’d had in her pocket on Friday night when all hell broke loose. Maybe he’d left her a message. It could be that he didn’t even know what had happened to her. But no one could locate her cell phone. In the midst of the chaos, it had been lost, and she did not have his number written down anywhere else.
Sammi asked her mother to try to track down a phone number for Adam, and she promised that she would. But as much as Sammi liked Adam, and as disappointed as she was, other things weighed more heavily on her mind.
Her father had visited for several hours on Sunday night and all of Monday morning. Sammi thought he seemed to want credit for missing work to visit her, then wondered if all of her thoughts about her father would be colored by such resentment from now on. Four or five times he stepped out of the room to answer his cell phone, and every time Sammi wished he wouldn’t come back because she knew that her mother would stay gone until her father left.
She loved him, but for a while she planned to give herself the freedom to hate him. Her mother must have shared at least some of the blame, but Sammi didn’t care. Her mother wasn’t the one in the process of moving out.
Not once in his presence did she acknowledge that she was aware of her father’s decision. If he wanted to talk to her about the fact that he planned to move out and separate from her mother—and eventually get divorced—he would have to muster up the guts to bring it up himself, to tell her to her face.
After he left, just after her lunch on Monday—soup and chocolate pudding—Sammi spent a few minutes just quietly crying.
On Tuesday, the police made their long-anticipated visit. Their questions seemed fairly routine. The doctor had already given Sammi an out, making it clear to her parents and the police that it was not uncommon for someone who’d been brutally beaten—and especially received head trauma—to have little or no memory of the incident. Sammi confirmed for the cops the first part of the story that Anna and Rachael Dubrowski and her cousin Zak had told them—that they had not seen the fight break out, but that Las Reinas had threatened violence against Letty and Caryn earlier in the week.
“Zak and Rachael had gone outside right before halftime—” she’d said.
“Why did they do that?” one of the cops had asked.
Sammi only smiled. “I’m guessing they wanted someplace to be alone for a few minutes.”
After that, she lied to the police. She claimed not to remember anything that happened after the first glimpse she got of the melee going on in the dark parking lot. The cops reminded her that Anna, Zak, and Rachael claimed it had been Sammi’s own “friends” who had beaten her so badly, that Las Reinas had run off by then. Sammi had tried to shrug, but winced with the pain, hissing air in through her teeth.
“Are you sure you’re not trying to cover for your friends?” one of the cops—Ransom, she thought his name was—asked.
“What good would that do? You’ve got witnesses,” she’d said.
But it was a good question. A better one would have been why? Why was she covering for her former friends? Sammi hadn’t given it very much thought. She just knew that putting the girls in jail would not be the answer. Images of that tattoo creeping and spreading across Letty’s back like poison ivy kept flashing in her mind.
Not poison ivy, she thought, as the cop droned on. Poison ink.
In her nightmares, she saw their faces again—T.Q., Katsuko, Caryn, and Letty, all grinning down at her with gleaming, dead eyes—and every time she woke from one of those dreams, her conviction became greater. Their behavior at school in the week leading up to the fight had made her suspicious, but that night she had become certain.
The girls she knew had not been an illusion. They had practically been her sisters. She had disappointed them, but not one of them would ever have willingly engaged in the kind of behavior she’d seen. And the violence…how could those four girls, none of them a fighter, none of them tough, take down six Reinas?
They couldn’t.
Unless their behavior wasn’t willing at all.
Sammi always stopped her mind from traveling any farther along the path of inquiry those thoughts would lead to. She couldn’t think any more about it, couldn’t dwell on it much. All her life she had loved mystery novels, and she’d haunted the shelves at Cruel and Unusual Books since she could read. Sherlock Holmes had always been a favorite, and while she knew her deductive powers were limited, one bit of advice Holmes had given in Arthur Conan Doyle’s work had always stuck with her.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
But the great detective’s reasoning had left one thing out, a question that Sammi had to deal with that Holmes never had. What if the only possible answer was the impossible one?
The police didn’t stay long. Sammi learned from them that the girls were claiming that they were the victims, that any damage they inflicted upon Las Reinas was in self-defense, and that any injuries Sammi sustained had been caused by Marisol and the other Reinas. They were all going to court. They would probably get off with a slap on the wrist for the fight with Las Reinas, but for what they had done to Sammi, they might all spend some time in jail for assault.
Sammi said nothing. Part of her—the wounded heart of her—wanted to cheer and say the bitches deserved it. But another part of her could not get that tattoo, that poison ink, out of her mind, and she had to wonder if they had not all been victims after all.
Katsuko’s parents visited on Wednesday. Like T.Q.’s mother, they did not stay long. But Sammi saw something new and different in their eyes, and it chilled her to the bone. These proper Japanese parents had seen their perfect daughter transform into something crass and wild and brutal, and it terrified them. They were so frightened, and when they apologized to Sammi for the behavior of their daughter, they seemed to be searching not only for forgiveness but for some explanation.
/> Sammi had none to give.
Her mother stayed with her for stretches of four and five hours at a time, leaving only briefly when other visitors arrived, or for longer periods when Sammi’s father lingered longer than she would have liked. Her mom had taken family leave from the bank and seemed anxious to get her back to her room and guitar, even though Sammi wouldn’t be able to play the thing for a couple of weeks.
Zak came by with Rachael once, and Anna Dubrowski came by on her own twice, both times with a guilty look in her eyes, as though she blamed herself for some part of what had happened to Sammi. Nothing she could have done would have stopped the beating, but if Anna understood that, the fact seemed to comfort her not at all.
On Wednesday afternoon, while Anna was visiting, Sammi’s mother went out to get a cup of coffee and a breath of fresh air. Anna seemed to have been waiting for a moment alone with her.
“Oh my God, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“In secret? What’s going on?”
Anna glanced around the room as though searching for the answer. “I don’t know. Something’s really wrong with those girls, Caryn and the others. I mean, duh, obviously they beat the shit out of you, so we know they’re deranged. But everyone’s talking about them at school, how weird they’ve gotten. They’re totally spaced now, like they don’t even remember things they’ve done from one minute to another.
“And they’re creepy. I’ve heard them use the same phrases in the same tone of voice in the same day. Yeah, you spend serious time with the same group of girls and you’re going to start to act alike, but this is way beyond that. Plus they’re totally turning into party whores—”
Sammi scowled in disgust.
“I know!” Anna said, shuddering. “I mean, Simone Deveaux? But some of my friends were at a party on Sunday night they were all at and said they were getting high. Katsuko always came off as pretty conceited and uptight to me even before all this happened, but Jenny Carr walked in on her in a bedroom with Jeremy—they were naked and doing lines of coke off each other’s stomachs.”
The pain in Sammi’s cheek and ribs had subsided a little each day. At that moment, she shifted on the hospital bed and they flared. She winced as she raised her head from the pillow to stare at Anna.
“Are you kidding me? Seriously?”
Anna nodded, regret filling her eyes. “I know I didn’t see it myself, but I’ve been friends with Jenny since, like, second grade. She wouldn’t make something like that up. Not about anybody.”
Sammi felt like vomiting. “Oh my God.”
“I know. Supposedly they all hooked up with people that night. Simone and Caryn totally made out, and everyone cheered them on until some guy from Methuen called them sluts. Simone threw him up against a wall—broke a mirror and everything. Jenny said he freaked and started calling her a crazy bitch and she just laughed.”
Before Sammi could reply to that, her mother popped back into the room.
“Good news, sweetie! You’re going home tomorrow!”
“That’s great, Mom. I want to be in my own bed. Or, even better, on the couch with the remote. The TV selection here stinks.”
Linda Holland glanced back and forth between the two girls as though sensing she had interrupted something. Sammi forced herself to smile. She and Anna exchanged a glance, but there seemed nothing more to be said. They were both horrified, but how could Sammi even begin to explain her suspicions to the other girl? She couldn’t. Even with the way her former friends were behaving, Anna would never believe her.
I don’t know what possessed you, her mother had said.
Sammi thought she knew, and it terrified her.
12
S ammi kept the window down, breathing in the fresh air of a warm September day. She’d been cooped up inside the hospital for nearly a week and freedom felt delicious. It made up—at least a little bit—for the agony of the car ride. Every time her mother went over a rut or bump in the road, it jarred her mending bones and she grunted softly. Her mom tried to avoid the worst potholes, but the ride still seemed to last an eternity.
It might not have been the bumps that made the trip home hard to endure. Somehow her parents had decided that it would be a good idea to pick up their daughter from the hospital together. So she sat in the backseat and tried to smile while they pretended that nothing at all had changed, making happy talk to Sammi and trying their best to conceal their spite toward each other.
“Phil, don’t you have something for Sammi?” her mom asked as they rolled up to a red light a few miles from home.
“Oh, right!” her father said. Wearing that awkward, forced grin, he picked up a plastic bag from the floor of the front seat and took out a box, then handed it back to her.
Sammi stared at the picture on the box, which showed a razor-thin, cherry red cellular picture phone. A smile blossomed on her face, and her cheekbone hurt only a little as she tore the box open.
“So cool, Dad. Thank you.”
“It’s all charged and ready to go, honey,” her father said.
The light turned green and her mother turned left onto a road that ran alongside the Merrimack River.
“In fact,” her mom said, meeting Sammi’s gaze in the rearview mirror, “there’s already one number programmed in.”
Sammi turned the phone on and it jingled its welcome tune. Curious, she waited for it to cycle through its setup, and then went to the menu page of programmed numbers. Only one name existed on the list: Adam Levine.
“You found him.”
“Mrs. Parisi works at Kingston High School. She gave me his mother’s name and I just looked them up in the phone book. That’s the home number, though. Obviously I couldn’t get his cell.”
“No, this is great. Thanks.” Sammi glanced at her father in the passenger seat. “Thank you both.”
They were all smiles for a minute or so, but the happiness was short-lived. Reality set in. Instead of awkwardness and resentment now, though, the atmosphere in the car became melancholy.
“So, how are you doing, Sam?” her father asked as they drew nearer to the house. “Healing up all right?”
“Pretty much. Percocet’ll get me through the rest of the week. After that I’ve got to be really careful about my face and my ribs for a while. Dr. Morrissey said it would take six to eight weeks before they’re totally healed, but as long as I take it easy, I should be okay. The fingers will take about the same, but with the cast I’m not worried about screwing them up. Mostly I plan to eat ice cream and watch movies. The hard part is not being able to play my guitar. But it’s not forever.”
“Ah, you’ll be playing again in no time.”
“Definitely. Meanwhile, I plan to milk my injuries for all they’re worth.”
Her mother laughed. “Your legs aren’t broken, kid. You can get your own ice cream.”
“Oh, you’re nice,” Sammi said. “I don’t get even a few days of pampering?”
“Maybe a few days.”
In the rearview mirror she saw her mother’s eyes cloud and her smile slip away. Something troubled her, but Sammi didn’t want to ask what it was. With her parents separated and divorce in the cards, she didn’t want any serious discussion at all. Besides, she had a feeling she knew what had crossed her mother’s mind. It had crossed hers as well. At some point she would be well enough to return to school.
Letty and the other girls would still be there, waiting.
Sammi said nothing, and in a few minutes they pulled into the driveway and all of her concerns evaporated. Just being home made her elated. Carefully she climbed from the car and hurried to the front door as her father grabbed her overnight bag.
Once the door had closed behind them and the three of them stood in the foyer, the awkwardness of the moment became too much for Sammi. As her father put her bag down, she clutched her new phone and faced them.
“If you guys don’t mind, I want to lie down.”
“Of course, Sammi. Go on up, honey. Do you ne
ed help?”
“No thanks. I’m good.”
She started to walk gingerly up the stairs, wary of any sudden moves.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Sam,” her father said.
She paused, a rush of sadness sweeping over her. Knowing that her parents were splitting had been one thing, but being here at home and having her dad say goodbye, going off to wherever he was staying now…it became all too real. As she turned, she could not hide her sadness, and when she spoke, she knew her bitterness would come out.
Instead, she forced herself to smile and just nodded. Her father was not fooled. In that moment she saw his own pain and regret but could not feel sympathy for him.
Sammi went up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom. She heard her parents start speaking soft and low to one another. Her door hung open, and she stepped into her room. A wave of relief washed over her. Here she finally felt at home.
She bit her lower lip and shut the door behind her, staring at her bed, at her bookshelf piled with mysteries, and at her guitar sitting patiently on the stand in the corner.
She felt like crying but would not allow herself to do so. The emotion welling up within her came from entering her bedroom and realizing that until this very moment, she had felt endangered.
But here, she was safe.
It meant the world to her.
She tossed her new phone onto the bed and walked over to her guitar. Reaching out with her good hand, she ran her thumb over the strings. The sound that came from the instrument gave her even greater solace.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, she managed to get her shoes off and then lay back on a stack of three pillows. She usually slept on two, but her mother must have left her the third to prop her up. The remote control for the little TV in her room was on her nightstand but she ignored it. Instead, she picked up the cherry red phone and flipped it open.
The number was already programmed in. All she had to do was punch a couple of buttons. A glance at the clock told her it was after three o’clock. Adam ought to be home from school by now. She wondered if he had blown her off, or if he had left her messages on her lost cell phone and thought she had been ignoring him.
Poison Ink Page 14
