Cold Calls (7 page)

Emma had sent a text around eight, a long string of question marks followed by an angry-face icon. He didn't know if she was mad at him for what he did to Connor, or at the principal for piling on the punishment. Probably him, but Eric liked the idea that somehow she was on his side.

There were no texts from April.

April.

It used to be so easy. In ninth grade there was Rachel; then, the night that ended, he met Simone, and that was great for a while, but then Simone heard about him and Juliana at Nick's party and dumped him, so he hooked up with Heluna, the exchange student from Finland. Then she was gone and it was on and off with Simone again, then Chloe, then back one more time with Simone.

And then there was April.

Just hanging out at first, just friends, both sure it was nothing more, talking all the time, movies, pizzas, late-night texts, imagine-us-dating jokes, the jokes becoming questions, the questions answered, then real dates and real talks and real time together, wonderfully different, so true it hurt, both of them sure it could never get better.

And then it didn't.

Hang-ups and voice mails and unreturned texts, his hoodie she'd loved to wear returned, balled up in his locker, the necklace handed back by a girlfriend, her Facebook status skipping
It's complicated,
going right to
Single
.

Eight weeks later, and it was still a blur.

All he had now were the memories.

The best ones of his life.

That and the chance that, who knows, maybe, somehow, someday, they'd get back together and it would be as good again.

Just a chance.

Okay, there still was the whole bullying thing, so un-April it'd be hard for her to forget, but there was a chance it could happen.

And that was all he needed.

 

The number nineteen bus swung through the parking lot and pulled up in front of the main entrance of the Department of Motor Vehicles. It made no sense, since the DMV was closed on Sundays, but the bus schedule said that the number nineteen would be there at 11:50, and it was, right on time. Nobody got on the bus and nobody got off, and at 11:51 the door closed with a hiss, the driver retracing his route through the empty parking lot, turning left onto Ridgeway Boulevard.

At 12:32 it would pull up in front of the Jefferson County Community Center, where Shelly would get off, twenty-eight minutes early for the second half of the program.

HABIT.

Helping Accused Bullies by Inspiring Tolerance.

Shelly wondered if they'd started with a title, rearranging the words until the initials spelled something catchy, or if they'd picked a word they liked and forced the title into it. She used the first ten minutes of the ride to come up with better names and acronyms, stopping when she knew she couldn't top Futilely Underfunded Course for Kids Unfit for Polite Society.

She had the bus to herself. There had been an old guy sitting in the seat right behind the driver when she got on at the stop near the church, but he got off two stops later, and no one else had gotten on so far. There was another bus—the number twenty-one—that would have been more direct, but she was going to get there early enough as it was, and besides, she liked buses, with their big windows she could lean against and watch the world go by. At least this little part of it.

Unfortunately, the longer ride gave her time to think. As if she wasn't doing enough of that anyway.

Shelly tried to remember what it was like to think about other things. There was a time—a thousand years ago—when she had an opinion on
American Idol
and dubstep and
World of Warcraft
and Taco Bell, getting into endless
The
Walking Dead
vs.
American Horror
Story
debates, reposting cat videos, re-tweeting one-liners. She wondered how she had been able to let go and let her mind wander in and out of dozens of random thoughts for hours on end. Maybe there was a trick to it that she'd forgotten, a way to escape the black hole that sucked her into the same endless loop of the same endless thoughts every time. If only she could remember how to do it, how to turn off her brain, she could go back to thinking about anything, even stupid stuff. Especially stupid stuff.

The bus stopped for a red light near a Starbucks, and for a moment Shelly relaxed and thought about coffee. Her brain gave her a minute or two alone with that before starting the downward spiral, switching slowly to donuts, moving on to chocolate donuts, then just chocolate, then fancy pieces of chocolate, then chocolate in a heart-shaped box, and then, inevitably, unavoidably, she thought about Valentine's Day.

This time the black hole was filled with voices.

The 911 operator pleading with her to calm down.

The EMT saying he wasn't getting any vital signs.

The police officer looking down at her, telling her she had better call her parents.

And playing under it all, like a movie soundtrack, the long, horrible scream, then the longer, more horrible silence.

The bus jerked forward, and her brain let her go.

Shelly breathed in deep and slow through her nose, holding her breath till her lungs burned, letting it out in little bursts the way Father Caudillo had shown her. He'd also shown her how breathing into a paper lunch bag would take the knot out of her stomach and keep her from panicking, but Shelly thought it made her look like she was huffing paint, so she stuck with the other technique, even though it didn't always work.

“Once you get your breathing back to normal,” Father Caudillo had told her, “take control of your thoughts. Don't let your thoughts control you. You can't change the past, so don't waste time dwelling on it. Think about today, the things you have to do right now. Every journey begins with a single step in the right direction.”

Head clearing, she thought about the next steps she had to take.

First, she had to finish the program. The whole thing was too nice to everybody, even the assholes. While most of the video screen time went to the victims—the old “building empathy” approach—they also showed life from the bullies' point of view, and what do you know, all the bullies, even Chip, turned out to be sensitive souls, fighting their own inner demons and lashing out at others as a coping mechanism. They didn't use those exact words, but Shelly could imagine that's what the script had called for. The problem wasn't that they were simply demented or cruel or violent—the problem was the issues that made them act that way.

Okay, that sort of explained
her
situation, but Shelly didn't think it held for the rest of them. Maybe that little boy. And the Muslim girl who wrote all those notes to herself. And maybe that cute guy, Greg. But the jerk with the stupid haircut who got locked out, or that jock who kept looking at her, or that scary girl with the neck tattoo, or the rest of them? They didn't need issues.

So, anyway, finish the program.

Then she had to write up a reaction paper for school, a ten-page essay that was supposed to show how much she had learned from the weekend session and how sorry she was for the things she had done to Heather, who she wasn't allowed to name in the paper or to ever speak to again. The paper would be easy. She could write ten pages in her sleep, especially when she didn't have to back any of it up with facts. As long as she kept her real emotions out and kept away from the truth, she'd be all right. As for inner demons, she had plenty, but she'd probably go with a combination new-girl-in-school/devastated-by-parents'-breakup. They weren't
her
inner demons, but she knew it would be the kind of thing that would click with the counselors.

Next she'd have to catch up on her schoolwork.

The suspension would keep her home all week, so her teachers were supposed to send her the work she had to do, and her father was supposed to pick it up in the main office, but she knew how that would play out. Between her father not remembering to swing by the school and her teachers sending cryptic assignments or forgetting to send anything at all, she'd be behind in every class when they let her back a week from Monday.

The math she could do on her own, and she could keep up with the reading for history. English was something different every day, but her teacher said that the reaction paper would go toward her first-quarter grade. They were going to be doing pottery in art class, and that was with Ms. Augustyn, so there'd be no making that up. In science they were dissecting mice. Missing that unit would be a good thing. French was just starting to make sense—a week out of class would leave her
dans la merde.

As for the discussions in religion class, Shelly was pretty sure that she was the discussion.

So much for academics.

Her school required three hours of volunteer work each week. She had until the first week of October to sign up somewhere, and she was running out of time. When they first told her about the policy, Shelly had been tempted to point out the logical fallacy of required volunteerism, but she didn't think the people in the main office would share her appreciation of irony. Before the move, she had volunteered at a shelter that cared for rescued pit bulls, not because the school required it but because she wanted to. She was too young then to work with the dogs, so she had cleaned cages and filled food bins. It wasn't glamorous, but it still felt good, and the dogs seemed to enjoy her company. The first Saturday in February was the last time she had been there. She never went back. Better to walk away than to be told you weren't wanted.

She made a mental note to Google the address of the local animal shelter.

And, oh yeah, her mother's birthday was Tuesday.

She could buy a card on the way home, mail it first thing Monday morning. It'd get there on time. But why bother? She would never open it, Shelly was sure of that. Her mother didn't want to hear from her. Why would she? So that she could be reminded of what happened? Like she'd ever forget. She'd be better off pretending she didn't have a daughter. And as for the letters her mother had sent her? Straight to the trash. The phone messages? Deleted as soon as they came in. Shelly could guess what they said, the words her mother would use to describe her, the same words she had heard whispered in the corridors of her last school. And worse.

So no stupid card.

But there was one more thing she had to get done that week.

At least, that's what the caller had said.

Well, there was no way it was going to happen, so . . .

For one, she was suspended. If she went back to school early—for
any
reason—she'd get kicked out. Sister Teresa had made that clear. And it was no secret that she had to stay a hundred feet from Heather. If she so much as walked into the room where Heather was sitting, every teacher in the building would be on her.

Then there was the caller's ridiculous requirement that she video the whole thing and put it up on YouTube, which was impossible because her phone didn't have video. Besides, if someone else filmed it for her—nobody would, but saying they did—the cafeteria at the school didn't even serve macaroni and cheese. The closest they came was chili, and that was on Tuesdays. And this, for
some
reason, had to be on Thursday.

She didn't see any way to make it happen. Not by Thursday.

And this time next weekend, they'd know. Miranda Eduardo, the hyperexcited senior behind every fundraising event at St. Anne's. Deborah Knight and LJ Martin, the library geeks. Julie Redfern, future nun. They were the closest she had to friends since she'd arrived, and they liked her for who they thought she was.

But that would all change once they learned her secret.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, all over again, thanks to a voice on the phone.

Shelly spent the rest of the ride trying to think of some way out of it, but when the bus pulled up in front of the Jefferson County Community Center at exactly 12:32, she still had nothing.

“Q
UESTION ONE
. W
HAT DID YOU THINK OF THE VIDEO
clip you just saw?”

There were only eight of them in the class.

Impossible to hide.

Ms. Owens had arranged the desks in a circle and made them tape sheets of paper with their names in block letters to the fronts of their desks. Eric had liked it better when they sat in rows. It was easier to ignore people, especially when you didn't know who they were. Now when one of them spoke, everybody looked.

Ms. Owens sighed. “Give me a break here, people. This is our last video clip, and then we're done. But I gotta have some participation before I let you go.”

Annalise and the scared kid—whose name was Cody—raised their hands.

“I thought it was good,” Annalise said. “I liked how it worked out like that in the end.”

Ms. Owens nodded slowly. “You too, son? Okay. How about the rest of you?”

They all mumbled agreement.

“Think it was realistic?”

“Sure,” Greg said. “Chip apologized and Matt said it was cool and they moved on. Done.”

“I think Chip's girlfriend has a real attitude problem,” the girl apparently named Docelyn said. “I don't know what he saw in her, anyway.”

Eric and Greg exchanged knowing glances that made Cody giggle and Annalise and the goth girl roll their eyes.

Ms. Owens made them wait, then said, “What did you think of what Chip said to the counselor?”

The girl with the headscarf, Fatima, looked up from her scribbling and raised her hand. “I think it showed that he understood how Matt was feeling and how his actions were hurting other people. I think that that was his life-changing, empathetic, breakthrough moment,” she said, checking her notes and lifting a line from the film.

“I see,” Ms. Owens said, still nodding. “Any other thoughts?”

They all said no, that pretty much covered it, Fatima had said what they were thinking, each of them sneaking a glance up to the clock.