Premeditated (24 page)

“Aunt Helen didn’t say anything,” I said.

That was very nearly a literal statement. I hadn’t heard my aunt say a single word since the first night I went to the hospital.

“She didn’t want to get your hopes up if things didn’t go well.”

“Did they? Go well, I mean?”

“Dinah, you’re sixteen. I think you’re old enough to decide where you want to live, and if that’s back there with your friends, then so be it. You have my permission.”

“But, Mom—”

“You’re old enough to be emancipated, and if your mother wants to push it, Helen said she and Paul would get it done, then rent you a room in their house for a dollar a year until you graduate to satisfy the court conditions.”

I tried very hard not to bounce up and down in my seat—which would have done nothing for an image that had already
disintegrated by degrees since I bleached my hair out. I was getting to stay with Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul and Claire; I wasn’t a placeholder anymore.

Tabs smacked me on the arm and mouthed “What?” Apparently I wasn’t doing that great a job of not bouncing.

“I don’t have to go back to Oregon—ever,” I said, for Tabs’ benefit, before she made me do something that would have Dad asking if both my hands were on the wheel again.

Now I had a bouncing buddy.

“Helen said she’d speak to the school as soon as I spoke to you. You’re welcome to stay at Lowry if you like.”

Do I like Lowry?

That was a question I never thought I’d have to ask myself. The answer should have been a simple, slam-dunk no. Lowry was just supposed to be the backdrop for my personal tragedy—not real beyond the context. But Dad’s words that first day of school had become closer to reality than I was comfortable with. The people at Lowry weren’t strangers anymore.

Abigail-not-Abby and Dex were a couple of people I was going to miss. But it still wasn’t me. Not really.

“I don’t think you need to go that far,” I told Dad. “Claire’s welcome to keep Private School Land all to herself when she’s back home.”

I wanted to go back where I belonged—Ninth Street, where sleep was an elective, Tabs and Brucey wouldn’t be weekend faces, and trig was actually trig. Besides, Dex lived in the same neighborhood, so going to Ninth Street wouldn’t cost me everything.

“We’ll work it out when I come back to town, okay?” Dad
said. “You don’t have to make any decisions tonight. Go do something fun—consider that my last parental order before you become a legal adult. I’m sure you can use the break.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ll call you when I know something.”

I clicked the phone off and threw it onto the dashboard.

“So?” Tabs asked.

“So, I don’t have to go back to Oregon.”

“And you don’t have to stay in the kingdom of knee socks and headbands?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes!” Tabs pulled her elbows in close to her stomach and beat her feet against the floor mats. “You realize what this means.”

“The world is going back on its axis and I may actually graduate before I’m twenty-five?”

“Bzzt. I’m sorry, the answer we’re looking for is: ‘The Cuckoo bird’s on the mend and you’re staying here for good—so there’s no reason to go back to Paul’s house and mope.’ ”

“I do not mope!”

She made the buzzer sound again.

“You are in desperate need of reality augmentation.”

“Sounds painful.”

“Only if you argue with us.”

“Us? Who’s us?”

“Us,” she said, pointing her finger at my chest and then back at her own. “Me and you, that makes ‘us,’ which is a short hop from ‘we.’ And
we
need to celebrate.”

“Who else is included in this ‘us’ that you’re trying far too hard not to name?”

“Come on, Dinah—come with me. I haven’t been to a real
carnival since we were in elementary school. Mom was always afraid I’d touch something dirty and catch Ebola or the plague.”

“Carnival?”

“Yes. I want to go and I want you to come with me. Ride something, eat everything in sight, walk around in a daze—I don’t care, so long as there’s no mention of psycho-boys or the Cuckoo bird.”

She was whining. Tabs
never
whines without a reason, but there was no point in asking her what the reason was until she was ready to share. All I needed to know was that she was up to something and it involved getting me to the fairgrounds.

“Wouldn’t you rather help me burn my Lowry uniform? Uncle Paul can buy Claire a new one before she comes home.”

“Come with me, distract yourself, and maybe by the time we’re done, Claire will be conversational and they’ll let you and your uncle switch out visitation so you can see her.”

Whining backed up by dirty tricks and playing on my weaknesses. Whatever this was, it was big, and when Tabs dealt in big secrets, strange and unforeseen disasters usually lurked nearby. But with the promise of a new dawn to destroy what had been a very long and dark night, I wasn’t all that worried about it. Maybe we’d gorge on junk food and I’d throw up purple cotton candy for two days, or maybe I’d get stuck at the top of the zero-gravity drop for an hour.

Right then, I could have handled anything.

I had expected to hate the carnival. It was noisy and dirty and full of too many people, but my mood was indestructible. Tabs and I hit the midway hard and fast, stuffing ourselves and downing enough soda to power a small country with the sugar rush.

For once, I wasn’t putting everything into terms of “this should be Claire and not me.” Pretty soon, it could be Claire, and it would be.

There were still the therapy sessions to deal with what she’d been through, but that was a good thing. Claire awake and talking meant she could tell her own story. All I had to do was convince her to talk to her parents—and the police—and things would work themselves out. If she didn’t want to talk, she could at least print out all those letters she’d never sent me; they’d do it for her. All of the edges of my soul that grief had worn sharp were softening.

“Where to now?” I asked. I had been following Tabs around the midway, happy to let her decide the whats and wheres for a while. It never occurred to me that she might have been herding me somewhere without my notice.

“How about there?” she asked, pointing to a large red and yellow stand painted to look like a popcorn bag.

“How are you hungry?” I asked. “You’ve eaten three hot dogs and more of my nachos than me.”

“We’re not going there for me, we’re going there for you.”

She tugged me in the direction she thought we needed to go. When we were about ten yards off, I recognized a familiar dark-haired boy sitting at one of the picnic tables out front.

“Oh … gee … would you look at that. What are the odds we’d run into him here?” Tabs asked as Dex stood up and walked toward us.

“You set me up,” I said, and stopped walking.

“I do not know what you are speaking about, silly friend of mine. This is not at all a setup, nor did I text this person to let him know when and where to expect you. This is a totally random occurrence of me randomly bringing you to a specific location, where a specific guy, who is gorgeous, happens to be waiting for you,
specifically
.”

She got behind me and shoved.

“You planned this, traitor.”

“I am not understanding your distrustful tone, dear BFF. It’s nigh onto mocking, in fact.”

“Tabs, I’m serious.”

“Yeah, and that’s the problem.” She stopped pushing, and dropped the kung fu movie dub-in voice. “You’re always serious lately. You need to have fun. There’s a cute guy—now go have fun.”

“You all right?” Dex asked.

“Here,” Tabs said. “The package is delivered. Now I must go in search of lemonade and maybe escape through the front gate before clowns are involved and I’m forced to resort to self-protective violence.”

“You can’t leave me here,” I said. “You don’t even have your car.”

“I’m taking yours.” She jingled the keys that ten seconds earlier had been in my pocket. “You can thank Brucey for the pickpocket lessons tomorrow.”

Tabs ran off, leaving me once again contemplating bodily harm against another human being.

“Should I say hi or run for my life?” Dex asked. “Because the look on your face right now is making me think it’s the second one, and I want a head start.”

“You did this on purpose.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Not really,” I sighed.

I couldn’t be mad at him for plotting against me with Tabs—he was pathetically cute in his carnie costume; the vest looked like a piece of peppermint candy. I was a bit confused as to when Tabs had had time to squeeze another conspiracy into her schedule, though.

“Being yourself today?” I asked. The electric blue piece of plastic pinned to his vest read “Jackson.”

He shrugged.

“Sometimes there’s no benefit to being someone else.”

“I don’t know. I think you’d look great with a few of Abigail’s curls.…”

He frowned.

“I haven’t had curls since I was three, and we’re all better off not revisiting that dark period in history.”

“Nope, sorry. It’s in my head now. Nothing you can do about it, Curly Top. Ohh, were they blond, too? I bet you were one of those boys with little blond ringlets around your face like a baby angel.”

“Better than being born with a pointed tail,” he said. “Did you get the pitchfork afterward, or was it part of the package?”

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” I deadpanned. Even with Claire on the mend, I was in no mood to be called a little devil. Someone else already had that category locked up. “I’m faster than I look. I can still catch Tabs before she makes it to the exit if you don’t want me around.”

“Truce?”

“Terms?”

“You cease discussing my preschool appearance and I stop comparing you to creatures with cloven hooves.”

“Deal,” I said.

“Come on. You’ve never really seen this place until you see it with someone who has backstage access.”

Carnivals are made for cheese—the kind you can drown your nachos in, and the kind that says the midway is that weird combination of lame and fun that’s only acceptable at a fair or circus when things aren’t supposed to be exactly normal. While Dex dragged me through the crowd, we passed kids pigging out on ice cream and grannies waiting to ride things that couldn’t possibly have been compatible with their heart medications. One little girl with a glittered butterfly painted on her face had a firm grip on the fingers of a thirty-something-year-old man in an expensive suit who was sporting a butterfly of his own across both eyes like a mask.

Everything evened out at a place like this; classes dissolved. Everyone was subject to the rule of priority by order of
appearance … except us. There was an unwritten understanding among those who worked at the carnival grounds that they took care of their own, and part of that meant their own never waited in line.

Over the groans and protests of those waiting in the queue with tickets clutched in their hands, Dex and I were allowed to enter through the exits and bypass the lines completely. Even with all the things Uncle Paul had been able to buy since his business took off, none of it was quite the same as being ushered through and around scores of people as though “special” were branded on our backs. It was its own kind of power rush, and just plain cool.

Dex gave the man we ousted from his spot as “next” an unapologetic grin as we took the open seat offered by the zero-gravity drop’s operator. The safety bar came down and we were off, rocketing into the air and watching the crowds shrink to the size of ants below us. At the top, a brief jolt of panic shot into my stomach when I remembered my earlier worries of getting stuck at the top, but it was quickly replaced by the sensation of free-fall. The ride worked flawlessly, bobbing up and down to pause at different heights while our legs hung free over the edge of the seat.

“You okay?” Dex asked after we landed.

“That was … interesting,” I said. All the junk food I’d eaten earlier was reassigning itself space in my digestive system, but thankfully nothing decided to make another appearance.

“I love this thing,” he said. “Want to go again?”

“I think once is enough.”

Those waiting in line visibly relaxed with the knowledge that we weren’t going to make their wait even longer.

“It’s not
that
scary,” he said.

“No, but nachos only taste good going down—coming back up, they’re a nightmare.”

“Okay, so we’ll come back later,” he said, then opened the gate to let us out of the ride’s fence. “I was afraid you were one of those people with an irrational fear of carnival rides or something.”

“Nah. My dad used to work at one of these places when he was in high school. He said to watch how the tracks move and how the arms balance; that’ll tell you if the ride’s sound enough to risk a turn.”

My mother, on the other hand, simply forbade me to go to them, period.
Oops …

We left the rides and drifted into the part of the carnival that housed the games and walk-through attractions like the fun house and the house of horrors.

“Your friend said you were in need of cheering up, but you seem to be in a pretty good mood to me,” Dex said.

“My cousin woke up today. Only for a few minutes, but it’s the first time she’s done it.”

“Then this is a celebration,” Dex said, brightening. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s a surprise!”

He left me with no chance to demand more details and jogged off toward the “employees only” section of the grounds, blocked by a tall redwood fence. I closed my eyes and just listened. The air was alive with positive energy, ringing with the sound of laughing kids and everything that said life was good and still would be tomorrow.

The world was kaleidoscope bright when I took another look; smiles were everywhere. Being in the middle of so much excitement, it soaks into your skin, making it impossible to believe that reality is anything else. You start putting even the worst things into a happier perspective.

Even the guy you might have spent the last several days trying to destroy.