Under hot tips, someone wrote anonymously: Vindictive b*t*h? How far would a jilted team player go for revenge? I was with Aidan when I read it.
“Who do you think the vindictive bitch is?”
“Could only be one person.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Lexie.”
“How do you know?”
“She got dumped,” he said.
“By River?”
“Who else?” he said.
“What did she do for revenge?”
“I heard rumors, that’s all.”
“About what?” I said.
He holds his thumb on one nostril and inhales. “Someone put coke in his locker.”
“Why?”
“To get back at him.”
“How did you know about the coke?”
“You think I got the drugs for her?” Aidan said. “I’m not crazy.”
Aidan wouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize basketball. I was being crazy. But he worked in the gym office. Did he find River’s combination or tell Lexie where to look? Or maybe he just looked away when he saw her looking in the file drawer she had no business looking in.
She had to know River would get expelled if the school found drugs on him. That went a lot further than getting back at someone who broke up with you. But that was the last I heard of it. And River was still in school.
I turn back to River. “Who planted the coke, do you know?”
“Maybe.”
“What happened?”
“It was there one day, I don’t know how,” River said. “I didn’t think anyone knew my combination.”
“Did you report it?”
“I didn’t have a chance. Briggs told me. Someone sent him an anonymous note.”
“What did he do?”
“He said he knew it was bullshit and that I wasn’t a cokehead. He said he’d hold the coke for evidence, in case the person tried something else.”
“So you don’t know why they did it or how?”
River smirks and lifts his hand as if there’s no point in going on.
“What happened, after that?”
“A lot, Jillian.”
“I … I don’t understand.”
“Lexie and I had a thing for a while.”
“I know. So?”
He shrugs. “I’m a guy, she came on to me heavy, so I fooled around with her. It was nothing serious, but she wouldn’t stop. She thought we were this power couple.”
I look at him, not understanding.
“Have you seen the colored bracelets on her ankle?”
“Yeah.”
“Each one is for one of her …”
“What?”
“Conquests,” he says. “But I was the star player … she couldn’t go any higher. ” He shrugs. “She was insecure—that meant a lot to her, and she wouldn’t let go. But something happened,” River says. “I got into deep shit with the coach, and I finally used that as an excuse and broke up with her.”
“What happened?”
He coughs and looks away. “He caught us in the locker room—one night, after practice. She sneaked in after everybody had left. I didn’t even know she was planning to, but she liked to take chances and get over on people. Danger turned her on. Anyway, it was dark, and we were in the back. I told her it was stupid to be there. That we should go out somewhere. But she wouldn’t listen. Finally, I gave in. I thought we were alone, only we weren’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Briggs walked in on us. He’s a goddamn bloodhound.”
“What did he do?”
“He grabbed her by the back of the neck and without a word he forced her out the door, slamming it behind her. Then he walked back to me and said, ‘Down on the floor.’ He made me do fifty push-ups—with his boot on my back.”
“Why didn’t you report him?”
“Report him? Who do you think they’d believe? I wasn’t exactly the model student. Plus he had the coke too, so there were two strikes against me if he wanted to get me tossed.” He shakes his head. “It gets more complicated.”
Chapter 23
RIVER
I started to get strange vibes around Lexie. It was like being on a slow-moving train that without warning races out of control and can’t be slowed down. She got hold of me and the closer she got, the more I realized I couldn’t get free. Like that weird old movie Fatal Attraction. A one-night thing turns out to be the start of something that grows sicker and sicker until you realize the girl is a complete nutso, but by then she’s got you by the balls.
The first inkling I got of what she was really like was after cheerleading practice one afternoon. She was bitching about one of the new girls who joined the team. She seemed obsessed with her. The girl wouldn’t listen to Lexie; she had her own ideas and wouldn’t cooperate. With Lexie, it was her way or the highway. They were doing this pyramid, she said, and “what ended up happening” was that the girl got thrown forward. She landed hard and broke her ankle, and that was it: she was off the squad. She was lucky she didn’t break her neck. She was thrown from eleven feet in the air to the hard ground. Lexie didn’t know why they didn’t use mats or padding.
“Wasn’t there a spotter?” I asked.
“She was in the bathroom; she took a break.”
The whole thing hit me wrong. Just the way she told me. It didn’t faze her. She saw it as karmic justice or something.
“Who was holding her?” I asked.
“I had one leg,” she said. Before I could say anything she said, “She fell! It wasn’t my fault. She shouldn’t even have been part of the pyramid. She didn’t know what she was doing.”
“How did she fall?”
“She leaned forward, she lost balance, she was an amateur—how should I know? I warned her. I told her she wasn’t ready for the squad.”
We were in my room watching TV. I started to turn away.
“Let’s not fight,” she said. In seconds she was on top of me and that kind of ended the conversation. When I thought about it later, it was clear.
Lexie set it up. She wanted her to fall.
A flash of light from outside hits the window again. Then it’s gone. Jillian’s eyes widen. I get up.
“River, don’t!”
“Stay here.” I crack open the office door and take a step out into the hallway, the water pooling around me. I look around. Nothing. A smashing sound from outside makes me jerk back. Then I charge down the hall.
JILLIAN
River’s run off somewhere again, crazed, frantic. I’m alone. The window frames whine incessantly in the wind. Rain pelts the building in an unrelenting torrent. I go out to the hall. The entire first floor is flooded now. I rush through the pooling water to the stairwell and see water rushing down the stairs.
Stop it, stop it, I want to scream. Everything is out of control. Like a two-year-old, I want my mom. Only I have no idea where she and Ethan are now. Hours ago she was on the radio, but then she disappeared into a sea of static. Is she alive? Is she out in the storm reporting? Marooned somewhere? Did Ethan reach Austin? What about Kelly and Aidan, and River’s dad? No TV, net, phone, or radio.
Where is my world? Everything inside me seizes up, my heart skipping, beating soft and then hard, like it’s lost its normal rhythm.
Then random thoughts of things that could happen. The bizarre stories you hear about after a hurricane: people disappearing after torrents of water shoved them off embankments, others who had heart attacks and died from stress.
Or the eerie, inexplicable stories like the one in the news about a man who had left a stack of folded laundry on his bed. When he returned home after the storm, the whole house was flooded, everything he owned waterlogged and destroyed. His queen-size bed was floating like a boat in the
water. But on top of it was his laundry, exactly as he had left it. Neatly folded. Perfectly dry.
I stand in the corridor trying to hear something, but how can I with the storm insulating us from any other sounds. I see a dark shadow and jump.
“Nothing,” River says, appearing out of nowhere. He hesitates. “But …”
“But what?”
He bites at his lip.
“Tell me.”
“I have this feeling.”
“What kind of … feeling?”
He runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t know.” He looks around. “We’re getting flooded out here. We have to move.”
“Back to the storage closet? At least it has no windows. And upstairs, we’re too close to the roof if it collapses.”
“Whatever,” he says. He’s holding back. He looks nervous, uneasy, but trying not to let it show.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.”
We make our way from the office along the corridor. The water’s up to our knees now. River opens the closet door with the key.
“How did you get a key?”
“Al.”
“Who?”
“The custodian.”
“Is he a football fan?”
“An alcoholic,” River says. “All it took was a six-pack.”
No wonder the flag was still flying. And the water was left on. Then it hits me why he didn’t want to come back here. Lexie. I could have sworn that I smelled her perfume in here. I knew the scent. It was strong, musky, and cloying. It was made by Dior. It was called Poison.
Chapter 24
RIVER
We pile up the mats and manage to stay dry, almost a foot above the water pooling on the floor. It’s better than upstairs with the rain pouring through the roof. I kick aside a roll of paper towels floating in the water. It’s claustrophobic in here, like being inside a stuck elevator.
Sure, I think of Lexie. That’s why I didn’t want to come in here. Once or twice a week we met here during school. It was a goof at first. But then it wasn’t. If I didn’t want to meet her, she got mad.
“I thought you loved me,” she’d say, her eyes darkening. After that, I never knew what she would pull.
Once when we were on my bike, she grabbed my arm so hard that I nearly crashed into the car in the next lane. I freaked. I dropped her at home and rode off without a word. She came over the next day with an expensive speaker system she bought for me. I didn’t want to take it.
“I’ll never do anything like that again, I swear,” she said. “I had PMS and I was down because of the Spanish test I nearly failed. I love you,” she said. “I’d never hurt you, you know that, right, River?” She had a way of turning wide-eyed and earnest when it was convenient.
I didn’t love her, not even close. I never told her I did, so I don’t know why she thought it. I knew it was only a matter of time until she did something worse. Break up with her, I kept telling myself, get it over with. Only I was afraid to.
“There’s something about Briggs that I don’t understand,” Jillian says, interrupting my thoughts.
“What?”
“He seems so straight and law abiding, but he makes his own rules, like the keys and the hours of practice.”
“Rules? He doesn’t care about rules. He has one goal in life, to coach the winning team and reward the guys who get him there and crush the ones who go against him.”
“Didn’t he ever get in trouble?”
“With who?”
“Teachers, the principal, parents? I mean my way or the highway doesn’t endear you to people.”
“Would your parents complain if you had your pick of scholarships and you became a star? And the principal? We were heading to the finals and the school was eligible for all kinds of grants. Briggs is a goddamned hero to everybody. No one cares how he does it. Everybody takes his shit, no matter what.”
“But that’s not everything.”
“What planet are you on? The game is about winning. No one’s going to touch him.”
She lies back and doesn’t say anything. I press my cheek to the mat and listen to her soft, steady breathing. Strangely, it calms me. I shift, bumping her arm, and then ease away.
“I wonder where your dad is,” she says.
“Probably sitting in his car to prove he was right.”
“What was he like—when you were little?”
Where do I start?
“I remember him trying to get me out of diapers,” I say, finally. “And taking me to the john over and over to train me. ‘Grow up,’ he kept saying. His way to get someone to do something was to grind them down.”
“How did he get along with your mom?”
“She stuck with him. He worked long hours, and my mom brought me up. We would read scripts together, acting out parts, even goofing around sometimes so I was the female lead and she was the male, so I’d be sensitive to characters of the opposite sex—although I didn’t get any of that then … You know what?”
“What?”
“I always thought I had such a great mom, I didn’t need a dad. I even resented it when he was around. How sad is that?” I reach for my knife. Click, open. Click, closed, again and again in a familiar rhythm.
JILLIAN
“Let’s talk about you for a change,” River says.
I look at him warily. “What about me?”
“Did you know your dad?”
He’s dead, I’m about to say, out of habit. He sort of is. I get a perverse thrill by lying about him. I’m even good at it. Maybe it’s in the genes. Anyway, it’s partly true. The only thing still alive about life with him are the memories. A soft, “he’s dead,” short-circuits the conversation when someone asks. They mutter something about being sorry and then drop the subject because it makes them uncomfortable.
Only I can’t lie to River, not after he’s opened up to me. I want him to know. Especially now.
“One day we were a family and then we weren’t.” That about sums it up. It was pretty black-and-white, if you took the time to look. Only none of us did. I guess we didn’t want to know. It was easier to pretend things would go on the way they were and that when my dad didn’t come home until the middle of the night, it wasn’t out of the ordinary.
“What do you mean?”
“I guess it had been going on for a while, but Ethan and I were the last ones to know.” I start biting at my nail. It’s my imagination, I know, but the wind sounds like women screaming outside.
“My dad worked long hours and traveled a lot. He was a journalist too. That’s how he met my mom.”
“So?”
“So? So my mom was faithful.”
“What happened?”
“There was this girl, a new reporter at the paper. He was helping her with her story. Only it didn’t end there. He started staying out late … I remember hearing my parents fighting one night, so I went to the door of my room and opened it to listen.
“‘I was out with a guy from the copy desk,’ my dad said. ‘I lost track of time.’
“‘Do you think I’m an idiot, Steven?’ my mom said. ‘I pay the American Express bills, remember? I know where you go when you say you’re working late, or around the corner from work having a drink.’
“‘What do you do, spy on me, Ellen?’ I heard a door slam and then my mom started crying.
“They started fighting more and more,” I tell River, who narrows his eyes, caught up in the story. “And then one day it stopped. No arguing, no talking, nothing. They were rarely in the same room together from then on. They were past excuses. Finally he stopped coming home. Nothing was the same after that.”
River blows out a breath. “That’s hard.”
“I saw his girlfriend’s picture online. She was blond like a Barbie with this
stupid grin on her face. She was young enough to be his daughter, I swear.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight when he left. I never saw him again. Eventually he moved halfway across the country and got a job with another paper, we heard. Just left us. Can you imagine?”
“No,” he whispers.
“How can a man abandon his family and turn his back on his kids when they need him? No matter how I felt about someone else, I could never do that. Never. Never, never, never, never.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, but it doesn’t stop the memories. If only there were a delete key in your head to kill out whatever you wanted to erase from your life.
I stare at the level of the water around us, slowly getting higher. How long would it take until we were submerged?
“I remember seeing the suitcases downstairs. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘On a trip,’ he said. ‘When will you be back?’ He didn’t answer.”
My eyes water even now. It never stops.
“He said nothing,” I whisper. “Not even a lie. I think it was worse than having a parent die, because then it’s final and there’s nothing you can do and you eventually move on. But this way, it left an opening, even though that was ridiculous because he was never coming back. But I was just a kid, and kids don’t believe in never.”
Neither of us says anything for a while. I sit there thinking back on it, and I remember something I never focused on before. The weather. There was a nor’easter the night my dad left. I remember thinking it was a crazy night to go out if you didn’t have to. I always hated thunder, and when I went upstairs I hid under the covers to block out the sound.
My heart starts to hammer. Is that what your brain does—weave your worst memories together into stories? Or nightmares?
“What happened after that?” River asks.
“Ethan ran away … the next day. My mom called him for dinner and he didn’t answer, so we went into his room but he wasn’t there. We freaked, both of us.”
“Why did he run away?”
“To look for him, to bring him back.” I rip at my nail, pulling it off so close to the skin it throbs inside. “Two days later the police found him. He was standing on the side of a street downtown hitchhiking. A stupid little kid. He could have been killed or kidnapped. After that, all I knew of my dad were the stories I saw in the newspaper with his byline. I made a point of never reading any of them.” I make a face. “You know what I used to do?”
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