Complicit (15 page)

“Sounds more than okay. I heard you left with Jenny Lacouture. She's cute, man. Real cute.”

I don't answer. Jenny's
mine.
Jenny's not gossip.

“Guess some girls really do go for that loser virgin thing, huh?” Scooter leans into my personal space to run his gaze over the newspaper in front of me. He's scanning the article about the robberies.

“What's this?” he says.

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, I'm sure.”

He smirks. “Sounds a lot like—”

Cate walks in.

I look at her.

She looks at me. Then she looks at Scooter.

She turns and runs.

“Cate!” I yell, and Scooter laughs in my face. He doesn't see her. I jump up, managing to bump the table and spill my coffee. The cup flips onto the floor and the lid pops off. I push him out of the way.

I run after my sister.

THIRTY-FIVE

“Cate!” I call again when I get outside. To my left, I catch a flash of her jeans and the olive-green hoodie she's wearing. She's sprinting down the sidewalk at top speed. Her legs move like racing pinwheels, and I run as fast as I can. My heart's pounding and my fingers are tingling, but my hands still work.

For now.

Cate doglegs it down a narrow alley that leads to the parking lot behind the store. Barely breaking stride, she reaches down and snags a loose brick out of a sagging planter box. As she passes behind my Jeep, she rears back and heaves the brick through the back window.

The glass shatters. The alarm begins to blare.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screech. I fumble for my keys. I want to turn the alarm off before the cops get called. Hell, in this neighborhood, they'll probably get called anyway.

Cate stops dead. She stands there, staring at the broken window, like she can't believe what she did, either. In the hand that didn't throw the brick, she's got this pink bag, she's holding on to some stupid shiny pink bag.

I run right up to her. “Hey!”

She spins to face me.

I gasp.

Her face. Even after all this time and all this heartache, Cate's face is the same as it always was—beautiful and clear and sculpted in all the right ways. She's black hair and high cheekbones. She's green, green eyes and red, red lips.

She's just so
miserable.

“Cate,” I say, and I already know it's going to happen.

I just know it.

“You set me up!” she screams.

My hands go.

The keys fall to the ground.

I try to breathe. I try to keep breathing.

“That's my
car
!” I choke-squeak. “You threw a brick into my car!”

“I know!”

“
How
did you know it was mine? How could you know that? Have you been watching me?”

Cate's nostrils flare but she says nothing. Nothing from Cate means yes. It means guilt. And I'm gut-rot sick of her guilt.

“Look what you did!” I holler, and I'm talking about my hands and my Jeep and
everything.
“I did not set you up!”

Cate balls her fists and screams. It's an awful sound. Full of pain and insanity.

My knees shake. My sister is a force I can't control. “Look, I want to know what's going on. I read those emails you sent to Angie. You keep talking about
me.
Like I did something wrong!”

She claws at her throat. She leaves red lines in her own flesh. “You're trying to hurt me, Jamie. You always hurt me. That's what's wrong.”

“How am I hurting you? I ran into Scooter
by accident.
All I want are those pictures. Please. I have a right to see them!”

Cate's face goes pale. For an instant, I think she's going to turn and bolt again. Flee my life in her hit-and-run way. But she doesn't. She takes a deliberate step toward me.

Then another.

“What did you say?” she asks.

“N-nothing.”

“You think you have a right to everything, don't you? You always have.”

A right to
what
? God. I take a step back.

My head is swimming.

My heart feels like it's slowing down.

“I don't feel so good,” I say.

“No way,” she growls. “We're not doing this bullshit. You need to listen to me. For once.”

I don't know what bullshit she's talking about. I don't care, either. Colored dots burst before my eyes.

“Cate, I can't, I can't
breathe.
”

My sister grabs for my dead hands and yanks me toward her. “Stop it, you little coward. Do you hear me? Don't you
dare
—”

Everything goes black.

THIRTY-SIX

When I open my eyes, I'm bleeding. I taste blood. I taste hot copper.

My senses return slowly. I hear voices. I feel pain. I realize I'm lying on the ground in the parking lot behind Peet's. My left shoulder is half submerged in a greasy puddle, and a whole group of people I don't know are crowded around me, their eyes wide with curiosity and concern.

Cate is not one of them.

“Don't get up,” some guy in skinny jeans says.

I groan. “What happened?”

“We think you passed out,” a dark-haired woman tells me. “We found you here.”

“Your lip's bleeding,” a second woman says. She's standing beside the first and she's wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt that reads i'm the doula. “Your forehead is, too. Not bad or anything. But still.”

I lift my arms. Move my fingers. My hands are working again. That's good, at least.

“I think I'm okay.”

“Should I call an ambulance?” the guy asks. “You look real pale, kid.”

“No,” I say. I'm always pale. I roll over and manage to get up to one knee. I grab for my Jeep keys and my head teeters wildly. Did I really pass out? That's more than a little humiliating. Maybe I'm more hungover than I thought. I press my fingers to my hairline. It feels sticky, but I don't think my brain is leaking out or anything.

What's wrong with me?

Where the
hell
is Cate?

I look back at the three strangers. “Did any of you see a girl here? She's got black hair. About my height?”

“We didn't see anybody. Just you,” says Skinny Jeans. “You sure you don't want me to call an ambulance?”

I shake my head. I'm Magic-8-Ball cloudy. Cate
was
here, right? It's sort of hard for me to remember. “N-no, thanks.”

The guy eyes the car keys in my hand while the two women gape at the shattered rear window of the Jeep. The dried puke on the driver's side door.

The doula looks back at me.

“I don't think you should be driving,” she says slowly.

“I'm fine. I really am.” I smile and attempt to appear normal, not deranged or drug-crazed or whatever it is they're thinking about me. I sidle toward the Jeep and try not to panic when Skinny Jeans pulls out his phone and starts dialing. That's when I jump in, slam the door, and start the engine.

As I peel out and drive off, I don't look back.

 

 

Twenty minutes later, I'm at home. I've also locked myself in the bathroom.

I'm in a state of mild hysteria, a feeling akin to waking up with my hair full of water bugs or being forced to walk blindfolded across a long stretch of thin ice. Not helping matters is the fact that I'm pretty sure Angie's on the phone with Malcolm right at this moment. This makes me feel shitty, like I'm a shitty person, because I know he's probably at the golf course, trying to spend his Sunday alone, the way he always does, and now his tranquility's being ruined with the news of how I came home with a bleeding head wound, a broken back window, and no memory of how I got hurt.

My lungs make a frantic wheezing sound. I put the lid down on the toilet and sit there.

I can't catch my breath.

My chest hurts. Everything hurts.

What the fuck just happened?

Goddamn Cate.

I start shaking then. The vibrations originate deep inside me, a sick and fallow rumbling, like something volcanic.

I kick out with my left foot, tipping over the stainless steel trash bin and scattering tissues and cotton balls all over the floor.

But it's not enough.

I reach out and sweep one arm across the glass shelf above the sink. Toothpaste and toothbrush and dental floss and razor go flying.

Still not enough.

I stand halfway and press harder on the shelf, leaning more and more with my body weight until it snaps and shatters, glass falling on porcelain. Falling everywhere.

Still.

It's not enough.

I am only beginning to erupt.

My breath comes in sharp bursts. I bend over to pick up the chrome scale Angie bought for me when she was worried the Prozac might make me fat, and with a yelp, I hurl it straight at the medicine cabinet. The mirror explodes in a giant crash, sending shards of glass shooting back at me, peppering my neck and hands, before hailing down onto the floor.

For a moment I don't move.

At all.

I simply stand there, in the middle of the bathroom, blinking and shell-shocked.

Then I drop to the ground. I quickly grab the trash can and a hand towel and start sweeping up the awful mess I've made. My knees crunch on glass, my hands bleed and sting, but I don't stop. I work faster. Frantic and frenetically. I need to get rid of this before anyone can see what I've done.
I
don't even want to see what I've done. Getting mad, losing control like this, it's not like me.

It's like
her.

Once I've got all the glass cleaned up and I've washed my hands and lined all the non-broken toiletry items neatly on the edge of the tub, I use my shirt to wipe at my brow and sit back on my haunches. My foot brushes against something. I turn and look.

And groan.

It's Cate's pink bag. The shiny one. I'd found it sitting on the passenger seat of my Jeep where she must have left it before abandoning me unconscious in a public parking lot for strangers to find. I mean, who
does
that? I could've been dead for all she knew. I snatch the bag up with a snarl. Part of me wants to toss it away and be done with my sister. Be done with all of this for good. But I don't.

I open the bag and reach inside.

My fingers touch tissue paper, all crumpled and thin, and because hope and anger can't coexist, my ire melts away. I'm seeking images of my dead mother. I need them. I need her. I'm owed that much, aren't I? The only things of hers I've ever touched besides Cate and myself is her looping handwriting on the back of that photo I'd found hidden inside Cate's own bathroom all those years ago.

Catie and Jim.

My fingers grab something at the bottom of the bag.

Two things, really. I pull them out.

They aren't pictures.

Of course they aren't.

The first item is a ratty piece of fabric, small, worn, grayed with age and time and God knows what else. Grimacing, I hold it up to the light. There's a silkiness beneath the grime. I realize what it is and my mouth goes dry. It's
Pinky.

A literal piece of my childhood.

I smooth the blanket's frayed stitching with my thumb. I don't know how or why Cate had this, but I also don't remember the last time I saw it, which is strange. It's like, Pinky was important to me and then it wasn't and that makes me feel sad. And selfish. Like, what else have I forgotten about because I don't need it anymore?

“Sorry, Pinky,” I whisper.

Pinky doesn't answer.

I pull out the second item, which is bigger. It's a book. A paperback book.

I turn it around and right side up to get a look at the title.

What the ever-loving hell, Cate?

It's a play by Sophocles. Well, three of his plays, apparently:
Antigone, Oedipus the King,
and
Electra.

Sophocles?

I get up and walk to unlock the bathroom door. I peek out.

My lungs deflate with relief. Angie isn't standing there, waiting to concern-pounce or ship my ass off to one of those troubled-teen schools you see advertised in the backs of magazines. My room is empty. I slink over to my desk, where I switch on a light to inspect the book more closely.

The words “Ventura Youth Correctional Facility” are stamped in purple ink on the inside cover. Stolen property, apparently, which feels like it should be funny only I'm not in the mood to laugh. On the opposite page, someone's scrawled the words “fuck this shit fuck motherfucker,” and given what I know about Oedipus, I'm not sure whether that's irony or literary criticism.

I go to flip through the yellowed pages and something slips from the book. Right onto my foot. I stoop to pick up what turns out to be an index card. A makeshift bookmark, I guess, only I have no idea what it had been marking. I squint as I straighten up and hold it under the light. There, written in blue ballpoint pen on the bottom left of the card is the message:

just so you know …

What? Know what? I have no idea what this means. But Cate definitely wrote it. No doubt about that. I'd recognize her scribbly handwriting anywhere—besides, she always dots her
j'
s with
x'
s. Like she's wishing death on anyone who might dare to read what she has to say.

I skim the rest of the pages, looking for margin notes or messages,
anything
that might give me a clue as to what this book has to do with me or what Cate's trying to say. I'm not all that familiar with Sophocles. I mean, yeah, I remember Oedipus because we read about him in ninth grade, and who can forget a guy who kills his dad, bangs his mom, then pokes his own eyes out? That's pretty much a hot-mess trifecta, right there. Antigone, I don't know a thing about, but that same ninth-grade English teacher did tell us Electra was supposed to be the female equivalent of Oedipus, so maybe she gets it on with her dad or does something equally gross. Like kills her mom.