I had no idea what, if anything, I was going to say to Noah when I saw him. But English came and went, and he didn’t show. I dutifully took notes from Ms. Leib and loitered outside of the class when it ended, scanning the campus for Noah without understanding why.
In Algebra, I tried to focus on the polynomials and parabolas but it was becoming painfully clear that while I could coast in Bio, History, and English, I was struggling in math. Mr. Walsh called on me twice in class and I gave a grievously wrong answer each time. Each homework assignment I’d submitted was returned with angry red pencil marks all over it, punctuated by a disgraceful score at the bottom of the page. Exams were in a few weeks, and I had no hope of catching up.
When class ended, an odd bit of conversation caught my attention, scattering my thoughts.
“I heard she was eaten after he killed her. Some kind of cannibal thing,” a girl said behind me. She punctuated her remark with a crack of her gum. I turned around.
“You’re an idiot, Jennifer,” a guy named Kent, I think, shot back at her. “Eaten by alligators, not the pedophile.”
Before I could hear more, Jamie dropped his binder on my desk. “Hey, Mara.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked him, as Jennifer and Kent left the classroom.
Jamie looked confused at first, but then understanding transformed his face. “Oh. Jordana.”
“What?” The name rang a bell, and I tried to remember why.
“That’s who they were talking about. Jordana Palmer. She was a sophomore at Dade High. I know someone who knows someone who knew her. Kind of. It’s really sad.”
The pieces clicked into place. “I think I heard something about it on the news,” I said quietly. “What happened to her?”
“I don’t know the whole story. Just that she was supposed to show up at a friend’s house and then … didn’t. They found her body a few days later, and she was definitely murdered, but I haven’t heard how, yet. Her dad’s a cop, and I think they’re keeping it quiet or something. Hey, you okay?”
That was when I tasted the blood. Apparently I’d chewed on the skin of my bottom lip until it split. I flicked out my tongue to catch the drop.
“No,” I said truthfully, as I made my way outside.
Jamie followed me. “Care to share?”
I didn’t. But when I met Jamie’s eyes, it was like I didn’t have a choice. The weight of all the weirdness—the asylum, Rachel, Noah—all of it just bubbled up, trying to claw its way out of my throat.
“I was in an accident before we moved here. My best friend died.” I practically vomited the words. I closed my eyes and exhaled, appalled by my overshare. What was wrong with me?
“I’m sorry,” Jamie said, lowering his eyes.
I’d made him feel awkward. Fabulous. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I don’t know why I just said that.”
Jamie shifted uncomfortably. “It’s cool,” he said. Then he smiled. “So when do you want to study Algebra?”
A random segue, and a ridiculous one. There was no way Jamie would benefit from having me as a study partner; not when he nailed each and every question Mr. Walsh lobbed at him.
“You are aware that my math skills are even more lacking than my social skills?”
“Impossible.” Jamie’s mouth spread into a mocking grin.
“Thanks. Seriously, you must have better things to do with your life than waste it on the hopeless?”
“I’ve already learned Parseltongue. What else is there?”
“Elvish.”
“You’re like, a gen-u-wine nerd. Love it. Meet me at the picnic tables during lunch. Bring your brain, and something for it to do,” he said as he walked away. “Oh, your flap’s open, by the way,” he called over his shoulder.
“Excuse me?”
Jamie pointed at my messenger bag with a grin, then strolled to his next class. I closed my bag.
When I met him at the appointed time, math textbook in hand, he was all smiles, ready and waiting to bear witness to my idiocy. He took out his graph paper and textbook but my mind glazed over as soon as I glanced at the numbers on the glossy page. I had to will myself to focus on what Jamie was saying as he wrote out the equation and explained it patiently. But after only minutes, as if a switch had been flipped in my brain, the numbers began to make sense. We worked through problem after problem until all of the week’s homework was finished. Half an hour for what would normally have taken me two and netted me an F for my efforts, and my work was perfect.
I gave a low whistle. “Damn. You’re good.”
“It’s all you, Mara.”
I shook my head. He nodded his.
“All right,” I acquiesced. “Either way, thanks.”
He bent into an exaggerated bow before we headed to Spanish. We made meaningless small talk on the way, steering clear of dead people as a topic of conversation. When we reached the classroom, Morales lumbered up from her desk to the blackboard and wrote down a series of verbs for us to conjugate. Characteristically, she called on me first. I answered wrong. She threw a piece of chalk at me, scattering my good mood from my lunchtime study session into a million pieces.
When class ended, Jamie offered to help me with Spanish, too. I accepted.
At the end of the day, I stuffed my now unnecessary textbook in my locker. I needed to spend some quality time with my sketchbook not drawing Noah, not drawing anyone. I shifted my books to one side of the locker and searched through a week’s worth of refuse, but didn’t see it. I leafed through my messenger bag, but it wasn’t there, either. Irritated, I dropped my bag so I could focus, and it slid against the bottom row of lockers, dislodging some pink fliers taped to the metal before it hit the concrete. Still nothing. I started pulling out my books one at a time as raw, arctic fear coiled in my stomach. Faster and faster, I tore through my things and let them fall to the ground until I was staring at my empty locker.
My sketchbook was gone.
Tears threatened my eyes, but a bunch of students walked into the locker niche and I refused to cry in public. Sluggishly, I put my books back into my locker and removed the flier that was now stuck to the front of my Algebra textbook. A costume party on South Beach hosted by one of Croyden’s elite, in honor of the teacher workday tomorrow. I didn’t bother reading the rest of the details before letting it fall to the ground again. Not my scene.
None of this was my scene. Not Florida and its hordes of tan blonds and mosquitoes. Not Croyden and its painfully generic student body. I’d made a friend in Jamie, but I missed Rachel. And she was gone.
Screw it. I ripped a flier off of another locker and shoved it in my messenger bag. I needed a party. I jogged to the back gate to meet Daniel. He looked uncharacteristically cool in the Croyden uniform, and happy until he saw me—then his face transformed into a mask of brotherly concern.
“You’re looking unusually glum this afternoon,” he said.
I got in the car. “I lost my sketchbook.”
“Oh,” he said. And after a beat, “Was there anything important in it?”
Other than the several detailed sketches of the most infuriatingly beautiful person in our school? No, not really.
I changed the subject. “What were you looking so happy about before I curdled your good mood?”
“Did I look happy? I don’t remember looking happy,” he said. He was stalling. And speeding. I glanced at the odometer; he was doing over fifty miles per hour before we got to the highway. Living dangerously for Daniel. Very suspicious.
“You looked happy,” I said to him. “Spill.”
“I’m going to the party tonight.”
I did a double take. It definitely wasn’t Daniel’s scene. “Who are you going with?”
He blushed and shrugged. No way. Did my brother have a … crush?
“Who?!” I demanded.
“The violinist. Sophie.”
I stared at him, mouth agape.
“It’s not a date,” he added immediately. “I’m just
meeting her there.”
The beginnings of an idea sprouted as we turned off the highway. “Mind if I tag along?” I asked. Now it was Daniel’s turn to double take. “I promise not to interfere with your amorous advances.”
“You know, I was going to say yes, but now…”
“Oh, come on. I just need a ride.”
“All right. But who are you going to see, pray tell?”
Huh. I hadn’t planned to see anyone. I just wanted to dance and sweat and forget and—
“What the hell?” Daniel whispered, as we rounded the corner of our street.
A massive gathering of news vans and people lined the pavement in front of our driveway. Daniel and I looked at each other, and I knew we shared the same thought.
Something was wrong.
19
THE SEA OF REPORTERS PARTED FOR DANIEL’s car as he pulled into the driveway. They peered at us as we rolled by; the cameramen seemed to be packing up their equipment, and the satellites on the vans had been retracted into the vehicles. Whatever had happened, they were getting ready to leave.
As soon as Daniel came to a stop, I rocketed out of the car toward the front door, passing both my mother and father’s car. My father’s car. Which didn’t belong here this early.
I was ready to be sick when I finally burst into the house with Daniel behind me. Electronic machine gunfire and video game music met my ears, and the familiar shape of our little brother’s head stared up at the screen from his cross-legged position on the floor. I closed my eyes and breathed through flared nostrils, trying to slow my heart before it exploded in my chest.
Daniel was the first to speak. “What the hell is going on?”
Joseph half-turned to look at Daniel, annoyed at the interruption. “Dad took on some kind of big case.”
“Can you turn that off?”
“One sec, I don’t want to die.” Joseph’s avatar bludgeoned a mustachioed villain into a thick, oozing puddle of goo.
My parents appeared soundlessly in the door frame of the kitchen.
“Turn it off, Joseph.” My mom sounded exhausted.
My brother sighed and paused the game.
“What’s happening?” Daniel asked.
“A case of mine is going to trial soon,” my father said, “and I was announced as the defendant’s new counsel today.”
A shadow of comprehension passed over my older brother’s face, but I didn’t get it.
“We just moved here,” I said. “Isn’t that, like, unusually fast?”
My mother and father exchanged a look. There was definitely something I was missing.
“What? What’s going on?”
“I took over the case for a friend of mine,” my father said.
“Why?”
“He withdrew.”
“Okay.”
“Before we moved here.”
I paused to absorb what I was hearing. “So you had the case before we moved to Florida.”
“Yes.”
That shouldn’t matter, unless …
I swallowed, and asked the question I already knew the answer to. “What is it? What case?”
“The Palmer murder.”
I massaged my forehead. No big deal. My father had defended murder cases before, and I tried to calm the nausea that unsettled my stomach. My mother started assembling ingredients from the pantry for dinner, and for no reason, no good reason at all, I pictured human body parts on a plate.
I shook my head to clear it. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked my father. Then glanced at Daniel, wondering why he was so quiet.
He avoided my gaze. Ah. They didn’t tell me.
“We didn’t want you to have to worry about it. Not after—,” he started, then stopped. “But now that things are heating up, I guess it’s better this way. You remember my friend Nathan Gold?” my father asked me.
I nodded.
“When he found out we were moving, he asked me to take the case for him. I’m going to be doing some press conferences over the next couple of weeks. I don’t know how they got the address here—I should have had Gloria send out a release about the substitution before it leaked,” he said, mostly to himself.
And that was all fine, but I hated that they were treating me like some delicate, fragile thing. And let’s be honest; it probably wasn’t “they.” I had no doubt my mother, as my unofficial treating psychologist, was responsible for the information that did and did not flow my way.
I turned to her. “You could have told me, you know.” She silently hid behind the open refrigerator. I talked to her anyway. “I miss my friends and yeah, it’s messed-up that this girl died, but it has nothing to do with what happened to Rachel. You don’t have to keep me in the dark about stuff like this. I don’t understand why you’re treating me like I’m two.”
“Joseph, go do your homework,” my mother said.
My brother had been inching his way back into the living room, having almost reached the controller by the time she said his name.
“But there’s no school tomorrow.”
“Then go to your room.”
“What did I do?” he whined.
“Nothing, I just want to talk to your sister for a minute.”
“Mom,” Daniel interrupted.
“Not now, Daniel.”
“You know what, Mom? Talk to Daniel,” I said. “I have nothing else to say.”
My mother didn’t speak. She looked tired; beautiful, as usual, but tired. The recessed lighting haloed her dark hair.
After a pause, Daniel spoke again. “So there’s a party tonight and—”
“You can go,” my mother said.
“Thanks. I thought I’d take Mara with me.”
My mother turned her back to me and gave Daniel her full attention. Daniel made eye contact with me over her shoulder and shrugged, as if to say, It’s the least I can do.
My mother hesitated before saying, “It’s a school night.” Of course that only bothered her when I was the subject of the conversation.
“There’s no school tomorrow,” Daniel said.
“Where is it?”
“South Beach,” Daniel said.
“And you’re going to be there the whole time?”
“Yes. I won’t leave her alone.”
She turned to my father. “Marcus?”
“It’s fine with me,” my dad said.
My mother then looked at me carefully. She didn’t trust me for a hot minute, but she trusted her perfect eldest child. A conundrum.
“All right,” she said finally. “Be home by eleven, though. No excuses.”
It was an impressive display of Daniel’s influence, I’ll admit. Not quite enough to make me forget how irritated I was with our mother, but the prospect of getting out of the house and going somewhere that wasn’t school did lift my mood. Maybe tonight I could actually have fun.
I left the kitchen to shower. The hot water scalded my thin shoulder blades, and I slumped against the tile and let the water glide over my skin. I needed to think of a costume; I did not want to be the only person wearing the wrong thing again.
I stepped out of the shower and threw on a T-shirt and yoga pants before untangling my rat’s nest of wet hair. Rifling through my dresser would be hopeless. Same with my closet.
But my mother’s closet …
Most of the time, she wore suit pants or a skirt and a button-down shirt. Always professional, thoroughly American. But I knew she had a sari or two buried somewhere in that enormous, monochromatic wardrobe of hers. It could work.
I tiptoed to my parents’ room and cracked open the door. They were still in the kitchen. I began searching through my mother’s clothes, looking for something suitable.
“Mara?”
Oops. I turned around. The stress was evident in my mother’s face, her skin taut over her high cheekbones.
“I was just looking for something to wear,” I said. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay, Mara. I just wish we c
ould—”
I inhaled slowly. “Can we do this later? Daniel said there’s going to be traffic and I have to figure out a costume.”
My mother’s forehead creased. I knew she wanted to say something but I hoped she’d let it go, just this once. I was surprised when a conspiratorial smile slowly transformed her face.
“It’s a costume party?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I think I might have something,” she said. She brushed past me and disappeared into the depths of her walk-in closet. After a few minutes, my mother emerged holding a garment bag that she cradled like a small child, and a pair of perilously high, strappy heels that dangled from her fingers. “This should fit you.”
I eyed the bag warily. “It’s not a wedding gown, is it?”
“No.” She smiled and handed it to me. “It’s a dress. One of my mother’s. Take my red lipstick and pin up your hair, and you can go as a vintage model.”
A smile spread across my face, matching my mother’s. “Thanks,” I said, and meant it.
“Just do me this one favor?”
I raised my eyebrows, waiting for the caveat.
“Stay with Daniel.”
Her voice was strained, and I felt guilty. Again. I nodded and thanked her again for the dress before I made my way back to my room to try it on. The firm plastic of the garment bag rustled as I unzipped it, and dark, emerald green silk shimmered from inside. I withdrew the dress from the bag and my breath caught in my throat. It was stunning. I hoped it fit.
I went to my bathroom to attempt to put on mascara without impaling my eyeball, but when I looked in the mirror, Claire stood behind my reflection.
She winked. “You two kids have fun.”
20
I SHOT OUT OF MY BATHROOM AND SAT ON MY BED, my mouth dry and my hands trembling. I wanted to scream, but I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe. Claire was dead. She was not in my bathroom, and there was nothing to be scared of. My mind was playing tricks on me. I was going to go to a party tonight, and I needed to get dressed. One thing at a time.
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