by Lisa McMann
Twenty-Nine
The saddest part, the part that makes the tears rush out of the corners of my eyes as I lie in bed an hour later, staring at the ceiling, is that he thinks listening to me is enough, and believing me is too much.
In school Friday I can’t help but look for him, and I find him looking for me, his melancholy eyes sending me a weird, pitying glance, like he’s trying to empathize, and it only frustrates me.
I get it now. He’s being Sawyer, the guy who is nice to the outcasts—one of my favorite things about him. That’s the kid, the guy, I’ve always loved. But I never, ever wanted to be the target. I wanted to be the partner. He believes he’s protecting me in a way, but it feels like he’s leading me on with his listening ear, trying to be there for an old friend who’s losing her marbles. He even sends me a text message. “You doing okay? We should talk at lunch. Under the slide? ”
And that about does me in. I can’t even answer it, because when he’s dead, I want this to be the only text in the thread on my phone.
Dear dog, I’m such a mess.
• • •
He finds me at the drinking fountain.
“Hey!” he says in a strangely cheerful voice. His smile isn’t the one from last night. It’s the volunteer smile, the good-student smile. The fake smile.
“Hi,” I say with as much enthusiasm as I can. I bite my lip, wondering when, between two in the morning and now, things actually changed for him. When he became distant, nice-guy Sawyer, and if he regrets going down to meet me in the middle of the night when he might not have been thinking straight.
“You doing okay?”
I smile and nod. “Mm-hmm. You?”
“A little tired.” He laughs.
My heart is breaking. I don’t want to be in this conversation. I don’t want to be his animal shelter favorite. I’d rather be ignored than that. “Yeah,” I say. My laugh is hollow, and I wonder if he notices.
“Hey, about last night,” he says, lowering his voice considerably. “I probably can’t ever do that again, okay? So maybe don’t . . . come over. Anymore. It’s just a bad idea, you know? The family thing and all.” His face is strained, about to crack from the perma-smile. “I’d get in a lot of trouble if I got caught.”
“Sure, yeah,” I say. “Yeah, no, I won’t do that ever again. It was definitely a one time thing.” I turn my head, looking for a distraction so I can get out of here. “Just did it for old times’ sake, I guess. I don’t know. It was dumb.”
He relaxes a little, and the awkwardness, still there, has a veil over it now. “Okay, cool.” He shuffles his feet, suddenly at a loss for words. He points with his thumb down the hallway. “I’m supposed to be meeting . . . someone . . .”
“Of course, yeah. Go. Good to see you.” I wave him away and turn back to the drinking fountain.
“And—” he says in a smiley, awkward voice. “And, um, I’m not actually going to be working Valentine’s Day anyway. I’ll be at the dance. So, you know, whatever that thing is you’re worried about, well, you don’t need to worry anymore, ’cause it’s cool.”
I stare at the stream of water in front of me, not thinking about anything except the fact that this is my last good-bye with him, and it sucks. I don’t look at him. “Okay, great.”
He hesitates and then starts walking away, and I’m cursing myself because this isn’t how I want it to end. Not like this at all. These words of sheer idiocy cannot be our last words.
I let go of the spigot and stand up. “Hey, Sawyer?”
He stops and turns back, and the fake shit is gone from his face. “Yeah?”
I press my lips together and thread my fingers, bringing my hands up to my chest nervously, and then I smile while everything breaks inside. “It’s okay,” I say, nodding, and I can feel my bottom lip quivering anyway. “It’s okay that you don’t believe me. I’ll leave you alone now. I really do love you, like I said the other . . . that one time. The other day. I just want you to know that.”
He stands there, his face stricken and real, and falling. He opens his mouth as if to speak, and then closes it again, and pain I’ve never seen before washes across it. He nods once, says, “Okay, thanks,” and then he turns away and walks slowly toward the cafeteria, ripping his fingers through his hair as he goes.
Thirty
When he’s out of sight, I go the other way on numb, stupid feet, all the way to my locker, and I stand there not knowing what to do with myself now. I open a book and there are no words, only scenes screaming at me. There’s nothing I can do today anymore. I have to get out of here. I have to go away. I can’t see him again.
There are two periods left in my day, and I will spend them in the meatball truck, waiting for Rowan to come. That’s the only thing I can think of doing right now.
I grab my books like I always do on Fridays, as if I’m going to get any studying done this weekend, and head out to the truck. There’s a teacher on rat patrol at the entrance, and I walk right by him. “Orthodontist appointment,” I say, even though I got my braces off two years ago. Worked like a charm then, and it does now, too. He doesn’t even try to stop me.
When I push through the door, it’s snowing.
I walk to the truck, the cold flakes kissing my cheeks and making my eyelashes heavy. This is the beginning of the snow that I see in the vision, I think. The beginning of the end. Thirty hours to go. I get into the truck and start it up, letting it run for a few minutes to get some heat going, sit back to wait for the weather report on the radio, and close my eyes to figure out how the hell I’m going to shut that restaurant down and save nine people’s lives.
And then my eyes spring open, and it finally hits me, what Sawyer said. He said he’s not going to be there. He’s going to the dance.
He’s going to the fucking dance, and he’s not going to be at Angotti’s.
So how the heck is he ending up in a body bag? Does he come home for some reason that he doesn’t expect? Does he get a frantic call and return to the restaurant, and something happens after? Does he go in to save someone and die that way?
“Oh. My. Fucking. Dogs!” I yell, and pound the steering wheel. “What the hell is going on? Why can’t you just tell me what’s happening? Tell me what to do, whoever, whatever, you are! Ugh!” I slam my body back into the seat and scream at the top of my lungs, way back here in the last row of the parking lot, where no one can hear me.
Maybe I am insane.
Maybe I really am.
Maybe this vision means nothing at all, except that I am losing it.
Around and around we go again. Again. Again.
I don’t have time for this.
• • •
As the snow builds up on my windshield faster than it can melt, things grow cold and dusky inside my truck, and the vision plays out more clearly on the glass. Teeth chattering, I start up the truck again, flip the wipers on, and whisk the snow away, realizing it’s coming down majorly hard right now. So hard that I wonder aloud, “If this doesn’t stop, is it going to be too much?” A few minutes later the weather report is in—a blizzard watch, and it calls for twelve to eighteen inches in the greater Chicago area over the next twelve hours.
“Jeez,” I mutter. I’ve seen my share of snowstorms, and one foot of snow is actually way more than a foot of snow when it has to be removed from half the city and put into the other half. If this pace keeps up, the fire hydrant will be covered in the first plowing.
The facts race through my head. Too much snow. Sawyer not working. Nothing’s adding up right to fit the vision. Maybe I do need to be committed to a hospital, I think for the millionth time. I give up on it as Rowan trudges through the snow and gets into the truck.
“You’re here early,” she says.
I put the truck in drive and hit the gas, trying to beat the rush of students. “Yep.”
Rowan just looks at me, and then she says earnestly, “What’s wrong with you, Jules? What have you really been doing?”
/> I glance over at her, and she looks scared for me.
“Nothing. I’m fine.” I turn the corner and then peek at her again. “Really.” She doesn’t say anything, so I reach over and pinch her kneecap, which she hates. And then I grin at her. “Seriously, kid. I’m fine. Things are really kind of bizarro world right now. Mom and Dad are cracking down on me for dumb stuff, but I messed up, too, by leaving customers without telling anybody, and that was dumb of me. And nice of you to try to cover, even though it didn’t work. But other than that, we’re all fine. ’Kay?”
“Okay,” she says dubiously, and leans her head against the side window. “I just hate it when everybody’s too quiet or too loud.”
“Yeah, me too.” I turn the wipers on high as we truck along, and turn the radio up so we can hear it against the beat and squeak of the wipers and the roar of the defroster. I peer out through the windshield, trying to ignore the vision. “Dang, it’s nasty out here.”
“Maybe we’ll get a snow day tomorrow,” Rowan says, excitement in her voice. “Oh, wait.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Saturday. That’s the breaks.”
“Work is going to suck.”
“It always does on Valentine’s Day,” I say. And I have to angle my head away from her because tears pop to my eyes. “It’s really going to suck this year.”
“Because of Sawyer? You like him, don’t you? That’s what everybody’s mad about. Right?”
I think about that as I turn into the alley and park the truck, and we sit and wait for Trey to get here so we can enter as a force as usual. “I guess you could say that. But he doesn’t like me, so it’s not a problem.”
“I think he does.”
“What do you know?”
“He follows you around, he watches you. I see him.”
I turn to look at her. “He does not.”
She shrugs. “Hey, I’m not blind. But like you said, it’s better if he doesn’t like you.”
I frown. Rowan is sneakier than she looks. But this news just makes everything worse. The aching crevasse in my chest opens up a little more. “Hurry up, Trey,” I mutter.
Finally he comes and we all go inside. It’s 4:04. I have exactly twenty-seven hours to figure out what I’m supposed to do.
• • •
“I wonder what kind of crowd we’ll get tonight,” Mom says cheerily. “Look at it coming down.”
Mom and the three of us kids stand at the front entrance as it nears five o’clock, ready and waiting for the early birds, but not sure if they’ll come out tonight or if they’re all at the grocery store stocking up on toilet paper. I feel like we could make a public service announcement letting Chicagoland know that if they need anything, anything at all, we probably have it upstairs.
“We’re going to be slammed with deliveries, I bet,” Rowan says. She’s the queen of gauging delivery orders.
We all agree, mesmerized by the heavy flakes. I shake my head and turn away, going into the dining room to make sure everything’s ready for the brave souls who venture out, and it is, of course. I plop down in a booth and stare out the window, wondering what Sawyer’s doing right now. If he’s remembering our awkward conversation, or trying to forget it. Wondering what’ll happen, and how. My stomach churns as now, in all of our windows, the vision plays out over and over, and I can’t get away from it. It plays out on the front of the menus, too, and the paper place mats on the tables, and the computer screen up at the cash wrap. The urgency of the vision is coming through loud and clear. “Okay, okay,” I mutter. “I know already.”
I twist the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to rid them of the vision, feeling myself slipping back into that place of hopelessness. Nothing’s right. Nothing is what I expected. Nothing is as it seems. I think that if I were a comic book character, I’d have the most desolate story of a wasted life—a wannabe hero who doesn’t come through for the victims. The end.
When I feel a hand on my shoulder, I look up. My mom squeezes my arm and then slides into the booth across from me. She’s always been pretty, but she looks older than she is. She has dark circles under her eyes, like me.
She puts her elbows on the table and rests her chin in her hands, gazing at me. “Where’d you go last night?” she asks.
I hesitate, suspicious. “To the library. I told Dad—”
“No, I mean in the middle of the night.”
I lean back in the booth, trying to keep a poker face, but I wasn’t expecting this. “Oh.”
She nods, waiting.
And really, what does it matter now? On Monday we’re going to have another talk. And I’m going to end up in the hospital with scary people. So I tell her the truth. Sort of. “I went to see Sawyer Angotti, to say good-bye.”
She is silent. And then she takes my hands and holds them and says, “I’m very sorry about that, Julia.”
I tilt my head, perplexed, and really look at her. She is sorry. I can see it. Wow. “Thanks,” I say. “That was . . . unexpected.”
She smiles grimly, collapsing her arms onto the table, and sits back in the booth. “You’re not the first person who’s had to say good-bye to an Angotti. I imagine it’s hard. Some of them are actually decent people, even if they make mistakes.”
I stare. “What . . . you?”
The bell over the door tinkles with the first dinner customer, and she gets up to take the hostess stand tonight. “No, not me.”
“You mean Dad?”
But she doesn’t answer me. Instead, she says, “Why don’t you take tonight off? You could use a break.”
Thirty-One
Upstairs, I can’t do anything. The windows are plastered with the scenes. So are the mirrors. The scenes dance around the pile of Christmas tins, play out on every board game cover, every magazine, every newspaper. Every schoolbook I open screams explosions at me. There are no words, only the crash. The crash is my life.
Sitting in the chair as it gets dark, I think about checking myself into the hospital. I don’t even know if I can drive when all the windows are playing the scenes. I can’t concentrate on anything, it’s getting so bad. I can’t imagine it being any worse. And finally, I wonder if maybe it’s trying to tell me something else.
Maybe it’s trying to scream at me that I’ve got the facts right . . . and the date wrong.
And that I’m an idiot.
And that this. Crash. Event. Crash. Is imminent. EXPLOSION.
I lean forward in the chair with a gasp, pressing my fingers into my temples and squeezing my eyes shut. All this crap circulating in my brain is making everything harder to comprehend, and it’s a stupid shame that I haven’t figured it out before now. But with this snow, it’s got to be. “Maybe,” I muse. “Maybe they put the decorations up this morning. And maybe Sawyer is working tonight. No doubt he is, he’s got tomorrow off . . . and the snow . . .” I slam my body back into the living room chair with a groan, knocking a box of recipes off the table next to me, and then scramble to my feet to check the time. “Holy shit.”
Because with these facts—the snow forecast, Sawyer not working—this crash cannot happen tomorrow night. It’s happening tonight.
It’s 5:42 when I realize that I do not have twenty-five hours and twenty-two minutes to save the world. I have one hour and twenty-two minutes.
ONE HOUR. TWENTY-TWO MINUTES.
My hands start to shake and my throat goes dry. The scenes from the vision are no longer attached to windows and walls and screens and books, but they swirl around me, giving me vertigo. I grab the wall to steady myself, and then I go to the phone, because the only thing that screams in my ears right now is the conversation I had with Sawyer’s mother yesterday when I was trying to get a reservation. How about Friday or Sunday? Friday or Sunday? Friday or Sunday?
I have the wherewithal to dial star 67, and then yank the restaurant’s phone number from somewhere in my memory, because I certainly can’t look it up right now. When a young woman answers, I say in the same voice as the
one I used yesterday, “Hello, there. Any chance I can make a reservation for tonight? Party of eight, seven p.m.?”
“Sure, one moment. I think we had a cancellation.”
I keep my eyes closed to stop the spinning, and count every second that goes by.
She comes back. “All right, no problem. Last name?”
My eyes spring open and I have to hold myself back from blurting out my real name. “Uh . . . Kravitz.”
“Kravitz? Seven o’clock. You’re all set.”
I almost shout, “Can we have the window tables?”
She hesitates. “Um, sure,” she says, and I think I may have scared her.
I force myself to speak calmly. “Thank you. Thank you so very much. You’ll have the tables ready right on time, right? We won’t be able to wait.” My head is aching.
“Of course, Ms. Kravitz. We’ll take good care of you.”
“Thank you.”
We hang up, and I feel like the band around my chest has loosened slightly. When I open my eyes, things have slowed down. In fact, something’s quite different. I lunge for the TV remote and turn it on, hitting slow motion immediately. And there it is. The difference. I pause it, hands shaking.
On the window scene, the tables are empty, and on the last scene, something else is different. Now in the body bag scene there are only four bags.
Only four! One phone call saved five people’s lives. “Holy mother of crap,” I whisper as I stare at the new frame.
But Sawyer’s dead face remains.
Thirty-Two
Despite staring at Sawyer’s dead face, I feel a surge of hope. The swirling scenes around me have calmed down, as if I’m being rewarded for figuring something out, for getting something right. I glance at my watch and try not to freak out. My next move is figuring out how to get my grounded ass out of here without being noticed. But first . . .
“I need you,” I text to Trey, and then I turn on the computer. Everything I see is the new crash vision.
