Limos, Lattes and My Life on the Fringe

by Nancy N. Rue

  But she wasn’t moving, except for the steady rise and fall of her chest that took a confused tangle of tubes and lines up and down with it. Her blue, blue eyes were closed.

  Mrs. Clare looked up and smiled at me. “We do not know what can she hear. So I talk to her soul.”

  “That’s — what I was thinking of doing,” I said.

  “Then come.”

  She put out her hand to me, and I rolled toward it, to a space by the bed.

  “Remember,” she whispered. “She loves you.”

  It was no longer a mystery to me how Valleri could be the person she was.

  I slid to the edge of the wheelchair so I could fold my hands on the mattress. After using up one of my precious five minutes insanely hoping that she would sit up and say, “All better,” I knew I had to start talking.

  “First of all, I want to tell you that I’m sorry I got you into this mess.”

  I blew out some air.

  “No, first of all, I want to tell you that I love you too. I never said that to a friend before. I never even had a friend before. Okay — you know all this.”

  I pressed against the bed and stared at her closed eyes. I needed the blueness. It always made me feel like somebody got me.

  “You know everybody’s praying for you. I am too. Seriously, I am. I don’t know what I’m doing — it just comes out.”

  I looked at the clock. Two minutes left. Get to the truth.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking — no surprise there, huh? — and even though I still believe I’m responsible for your accident and Yuri’s breakdown and Matthew being arrested, I think I’m responsible for some other things too, some good things. I just wanted to run them by you and see what you think. That’s the way we work, right? You and me behind the scenes, and then I take it to the mob?”

  She didn’t nod her mass of bouncy curls. But I pretended she had, and I told her what I was thinking. What I wanted to go and tell them.

  When the nurse came in and pointed to her watch, I knew what to do next. Before she rolled me out, I turned to Valleri and whispered, “Please come back. I need you.”

  If it hadn’t been for Sunny, I couldn’t have pulled it off. Well, as it turned out, Sunny, Ms. Dalloway, and Mr. Zabaski. They convinced Mr. Baumgarten that a meeting of interested juniors and seniors in the hospital lobby Tuesday after school should be announced in the morning bulletin. He conceded that it wasn’t a school function, but the school wasn’t going to function if there wasn’t some closure on “this whole thing.”

  My mom helped too. She arranged it with the hospital for us to use the chapel, one of the perks of being supernurse. She had a harder time persuading my doctor to let me. He wasn’t happy about my lingering fever, even though my blood tests didn’t show an elevated white blood cell count and my incision was healing nicely. I didn’t waste my breath telling him my temp had nothing to do with infection, but I did present him with a pretty impressive argument for the application of emotional support to healing. He gave me ten minutes.

  These people were tight.

  My father was the only one who said I was “carrying this thing too far.”

  “This is as far as I can carry it,” I told him. “And then I’m done.”

  “All right — and then that’s it,” he said and shook his head. “I should have listened to you about that private school.”

  I let that go for the moment. I could only handle one truth at a time.

  As three thirty approached, I experienced a smaller version of the what-if-nobody-comes attack I’d had before the pre-prom party. But I tried to pray that away and came out with, “Tell the truth to whoever shows up.”

  “Whoever showed up” was just about everyone in the junior and senior class. A hundred people were packed into the chapel, and my dad and Valleri’s were setting up chairs in the back. I figured the man in the policeman’s uniform must be Noelle’s father.

  The only person who seemed to be missing — besides, of course, Matthew and Yuri and Valleri — was Patrick.

  This isn’t about that, I told myself. I had to focus on what it was about.

  Even though Mr. Baumgarten was there, running his hand over his pink scalp by the door, it was Sunny who got the crowd settled. When she turned the podium over to me and I leaned on it for support, the same nurse who’d escorted me to Valleri’s room held up ten fingers to me from the back row.

  “Thanks for coming, everyone,” I said.

  “Go, Ty-ler!” someone called out. Probably my cousin Kenny.

  Someone shushed him. Probably my cousin Candace.

  “I’m sure you’ve all heard some rendition of what happened on prom night, and I know those of you who are so inclined are praying for Valleri and Matthew and Yuri.”

  The crowd rustled.

  “So why pray for Matthew, when he hit an innocent person with his car and then ran away? And why Yuri, when he planned to take down all our hard work with his paint gun? I’m sure Egan wants to know that. He gave everything he had to make the prom amazing.”

  In the fourth row, Egan mouthed a watery thank you.

  “Why pray for them, or even give them a thought? Because they’re victims too. Victims of the kind of bullying and harassment and class snobbery that brought about the need for a Prom for Everybody Campaign in the first place. Even though they made some bad choices in the way they responded, we are all partly responsible for the results.”

  The chapel was breathless and silent.

  “But not all of the results of the campaign were bad,” I said. “Because what if we hadn’t done it? What if we hadn’t had a dress shop, and a tux contest, and a pre-prom party, and a place to do our hair and nails together and another one to make corsages? We would never have broken down the barriers enough to see that money separates people, and equality brings them together.”

  I swept my eyes over the group that looked back at me — Ryleigh nodding, Graham rubbing his thighs, Alyssa trying to toss her head and failing.

  “I don’t know what you personally have found out. I wouldn’t know that Graham Fitzwilliam was a hero. Or that Hayley Barr has enough enthusiasm for thirty-seven people. Or that Deidre Proccacini really does care about something.”

  I only glanced at her startled face before I went on.

  “It was a rite of passage for us — and American kids don’t have too many of those anymore. We made it a real one. We saw in it the kind of people we can be. People with integrity and character.”

  I sought out my father. He gave me a misty smile.

  “Yeah, a horrible thing happened on prom night — to someone who bears no responsibility for any of it. And I understand that a lot of people think that means we failed, that it was all for nothing. I felt that way too.”

  I ignored the two fingers the nurse held up, and the weakness that was creeping into my knees.

  “But the way we handle this crisis is a rite of passage for us too. If we have become new people, we have to handle this like new people — with faith, and with support for each other and for Valleri’s family. You are the people that I want standing beside me.” I looked again at my father. “I love this school and what we stand for now.”

  I didn’t need the nurse’s closed hand to tell me I was done. My knees were buckling, and my friends’ faces were full enough.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “No.” Egan stood up, face pale beneath his freckles. “Thank you, Tyler.”

  He started the clapping. Fred picked it up. As everyone rose to their feet, I wobbled on mine. Amid the cheers, my mother took one elbow and Sunny took the other, and I sank gratefully between them. We headed for the side door, which opened as if by magic.

  But it wasn’t magic. It was Patrick.

  “Are you — is she okay?” he said.

  “She will be,” Mom said.

  She backed me into the wheelchair that waited in the hall, and Sunny pushed it forward. “I want to talk to him!” I said.


  “Right after you talk to Valleri,” Mom said. She squeezed my shoulder. “She’s awake, and she’s asking for you.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They all warned me before they rolled me into Valleri’s room that although she was lucid, she couldn’t move her legs yet, and she might fade in and out.

  “Just a few minutes,” said the nurse who had become my personal timekeeper.

  Mrs. Clare gave her a look with her Valleri-blue eyes. “She can take as long as Valleri needs her.”

  “I want to get to know that woman,” Mom whispered to me.

  The minute I saw Valleri, I discarded everything they said about her “fading.” She was so there, I was surprised she didn’t sit up and bounce her curls at me.

  “Well,” she said. “Did you tell them the truth?”

  “How are you?” I said. “Are you okay? Of course you’re not okay — you’re in a hospital.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “I know — I can’t even think.”

  “No way,” she said.

  She licked her lips and I dove for the ice chips. “No,” she said. “I have to give you a message before they make you leave.”

  “What message?” I said. “From Patrick.”

  I shook my head at her. Maybe they were right. Maybe she was fading in and out.

  But her eyes were growing brighter by the minute.

  “Saturday night,” she said. “He was bummed out when he got to the prom, and I got him to talk to me a little.” “Of course you did.” “He was depressed about you.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me that — but I told him he should tell you.”

  She coughed. I looked nervously at her monitors, although I had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing. “We should stop,” I said. “We can talk later.” “I want to tell you.” “So give me the short version.”

  “I said I would find you for him. And he said if you would come and dance with him, he would talk to you — really talk to you.”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s what happened.”

  “No — you weren’t coming to find me when Matthew hit you. Please tell me no, Valleri.”

  She closed her eyes. All the fear I thought I had put to rest rose in me, and I had to clench the arms of the wheelchair to keep from screaming, “Don’t fade now! You have to tell me no!”

  “I wasn’t coming out.”

  I pressed against the bed. “What, Valleri?”

  “I wasn’t coming out of the prom. I was going back in.”

  “From where?”

  “From praying. I went outside to get quiet because it was all so much, and then I started praying. Then I saw Matthew’s car so I ran to wave to you — “ Her eyes fluttered closed again. “I shouldn’t have stepped out in front of him. It was my own fault —”

  “No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Just so you know,” she said as she faded away, “it wasn’t yours either.”

  I was a wilted version of my former self when Sunny wheeled me back to my room. But when Patrick stood up from the chair in the corner, I revived like I’d just been shot with caffeine. And no amount of clock pointing and finger counting from Nurse Watchdog dissuaded me from parking the wheelchair next to him and staring at her until she left the room.

  “I don’t know how she expects to get that fever down if she doesn’t stop holding court all over the hospital,” she said to Sunny and Mom as she bustled out of the room. “She’s just a little queen, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mom said, eyes twinkling at me. “She’s a queen.”

  With them gone, I turned to Patrick. For the first time, I saw that his eyes weren’t dancing. In fact, the circles under them were so dark and deep, he looked like he’d just arrived at a funeral. My heart sank. “Depressed about me” could only mean one thing, and I just didn’t want to go there yet.

  “Were you sick yesterday?” I said. “Sunny said you weren’t in school.”

  “I sort of was,” he said to his lap. “I had to go see — somebody.” “I don’t think it helped,” I said. His head jerked up.

  “You’re obviously still sick or bummed out or — “ “I’m depressed.”

  “Well, yeah, I think everybody is right now. But Valleri’s out of the coma and —”

  “Not that kind of depressed. This is, like, clinical. I get these — I don’t know — moods where I feel like I’m suffocating and I have to go see my therapist.”

  “Well, do you want to talk —”

  “Yes.” He raked a hand through his hair. “I just don’t know if you’re gonna want to hear.”

  “It sounds like maybe I have to.”

  “If you don’t feel like it — I mean, they said you had surgery —”

  “Patrick,” I said. “Talk to me.” He nodded. Miserably.

  “It started after eighth grade. It was like I woke up one morning that summer and went, ‘I hate myself.’”

  “Why would you hate yourself?” I said.

  “Because of the way I treated people. I was the ringleader back then. YouTube and those guys would do anything I told them to do.”

  I grew very still, as if something familiar were creeping up behind me.

  “What did you tell them to do?”

  “Torment kids I thought were weird — just so I didn’t have to face that I was weird too. That we were all ‘weird.’”

  “What kids?” I said. But I knew. I knew because Matthew had practically told me.

  “Kids like Yuri Connor,” he said in a voice I could barely hear. “Mostly him. We made his life —”

  “A living nightmare.”

  “It was like all of a sudden I couldn’t even look in a mirror. I’d stay in my room for days and pretend I was sleeping, but all I could do was think about all the stuff we did to him, and the way he’d look when we stuffed him into a trash can or threw him out of the locker room half naked. It was like he disappeared a little more every time we did something to him. And that summer, I wanted to disappear too.”

  He stared at the window, even though the blinds were drawn. I was sure he was seeing it all, just the way it was then.

  “At the prom, when I was carrying him outside, it was like I was doing it again.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “It didn’t matter. I went to bed that night hating myself as much as I ever did.” He pulled the miserable, danceless brown eyes to me. “And now you must hate me too.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t blame you. You’re always so honest —”

  “Why would I hate you, Patrick?” I said. “Because you used to be a stupid kid, and then you changed and became somebody I like as much as I’ve ever liked anybody?”

  I opened my eyes to see him rock his head back. His face worked as he searched the ceiling.

  “I hated myself before this all started,” I said. “Only I didn’t even know it. Do you hate me because I used to be superior and disdainful and insufferable?”

  His laugh was thick. “No. I don’t even know what half of that means.” He looked at me, eyes red. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I even wanted to ask you if I could be your escort —”

  “And then I announced that I was only going with a group — because, of course, I didn’t think anyone was going to ask me —”

  “ — And then you showed up with Matthew —”

  “ — Because I thought you’d asked somebody else —”

  “ — Which I didn’t do because I didn’t want to be with anybody else.” Patrick reached across the wheelchair and grabbed my arm and pulled my hand up to his face. “I don’t hate you, Tyler. I think I love you.”

  When Nurse Watchdog burst in, she found him kissing me on the nose.

  “She needs to rest,” she barked at him.

  But I pulled him close so his ear touched my mouth. “Next time you come,” I whispered, “bring me
a latte.”

  His eyes danced again.

  I finally got out of the hospital the next day. Everyone decided that in spite of my fever, I didn’t have an infection, and that I was healing enough to go home.

  I visited Valleri before I left. Her eyes were bright, this time with pain. She said the doctors told her she only had a 50 percent chance of walking again. We both cried — and I promised to be there for her during physical therapy — and she made me tell her about Patrick. It felt like friendship.

  When I walked into my room at home, though, there was a sense of everything-is-different-now.

  My makeup and hair stuff and unchosen jewelry were still strewn where I’d left them the night of the prom.

  My cell phone, which I found on the table in the foyer where Matthew had put it, was dead. When I charged it up, there was a text message from Deidre. It just said IM SORRY.

  My wastebasket was filled with brochures from private schools. My father and I hadn’t talked about it yet. I was sure he was saving it for a dinner table debate. I was going to win, but I’d let him have his fun.

  The schoolwork I’d missed had been stacked neatly on my desk by Sunny, but I didn’t start in on it. I pulled RL out of my bag and went to the window seat. The warmth made some things feel the same. The things I wanted to keep.

  The rest of the disciples finally saw Yeshua, the warm page told me. And they believed it was him — although some of them had to have hard evidence. They had to touch his hands and feet. You can relate to that, I’m sure.

  Yeah, yeah. Go on.

  He went through the Scriptures with them too, and he was majorly clear that all of it meant a total life change for them, through the forgiveness of all the wrong they’d done, and would probably do in the future.

  I could relate to that too.

  Then he said to them, “What’s going to happen next is huge.”

  I held my breath. I was waiting for that.

  I’m going to send you what my Father has promised.

  Which is?

  You will feel it when it comes. A Spirit will fill you —