Premeditated (29 page)

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To talk.”

“Yeah, we covered that. It’s the topic of this alleged conversation I’m fuzzy on.”

“You aren’t as hard to figure out as you want people to think,” she said. “And I’m starting to get why.”

“You don’t know
anything
about me.” Certainly not enough to psychoanalyze me in the girls’ bathroom.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. She took off her blazer, hung it on the door handle, and unbuttoned her shirtsleeves so she could roll them up. This time her shirt fit, I noticed. “When
you did that presentation in drama, I almost came out of my skin. The words you used and the feelings you described, it felt like you’d been eavesdropping on my inner monologue.”

When her sleeves were at her elbows, Chandi turned her wrists toward me, inside up. A row of parallel scars notched her skin every inch or so in horizontal lines. Half of them were completely healed, and most of the others were on their way, but two on each arm were red enough that I could tell they’d been open cuts within the last week. One looked like it had fresh scabs on it, maybe from earlier that morning.

“You cut yourself?”

Her eyes had turned red. She wrinkled her nose like someone trying to force their tears back, and spots of color burst across her cheeks. Reaching for the pocket of her blazer, she put her hand inside and pulled out a fist. It took several deep breaths for her to get up the nerve to open her fingers.

A long silver pin sat flat across her palm. Three or four inches long, with a butterfly and fancy metal swirls on the top. The pointed end was too thick to be a straight pin or a needle but too thin to be a knitting needle.

Chandi picked it up and pricked along the freshest scar on her arm until she’d worked one of the scabs loose and it started bleeding again. I didn’t even think; I yanked one of those smelly cardboard paper towels from the dispenser and wet it before holding it out to her. She covered the new wound and held her other hand on top of it.

“I stopped for a while, but lately, things have piled on, and it was too easy to take the out. That’s the part you forgot to mention. Scars heal, but they don’t go away. They’re always there, taunting you. Tempting. I’ve bled through three shirts
since school started; Jordan’s started bringing extras in her bag, just in case, so I don’t have to explain the bloodstains.”

A cold shiver of remorse dripped down my back, thinking of that day in the cafeteria with Abigail-not-Abby and what I’d said about Chandi looking like a stripper. No wonder she’d been so introverted in the pictures I took.

“Chandi …” I faltered over what to say to her. Getting out of the bathroom dropped off my priorities list as soon as she stuck her arms out. This was …

I didn’t know what this was.

She didn’t like me. She had no reason to trust me, and here she was with her biggest secret open to the air.

“You aren’t the only one who had a rough night. No one died, but things aren’t going so good for me, either.”

“Chandi, it wasn’t me. In class, I mean. What I said onstage, those were my words, but not my experiences.”

She kept going like she hadn’t heard me.

“I won’t pretend to get the small stuff—that’s private—but the big picture I understand.” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her hand, trying not to smudge her eyeliner. The bloody paper towel went in the trash. “I get how things spin so far out of control that you want to find anything that’s just you. Something you can choose to do or not to do. It keeps you from losing your mind.”

Chandi smoothed her sleeves into place and buttoned them back up.

“I don’t cut myself.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “The process is the same no matter what. I use my Grammy’s antique hatpin with the pink pearl topper and enamel butterfly. You used a box of dye and a
pair of scissors. You made a choice to change something, and that’s more than most people do.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I know what people say about me, and I know what they think of me.” I must have been doing a lousy job of hiding my thoughts, because she added, “Don’t look so surprised. You’ve been here less than a month and you probably know most of it. For the record, I never said having a cookie name made me sound like a hooker. I don’t like my last name because it’s not mine. My dad’s last name was Taylor, but my mother remarried when I was little. She thought it would be easier on everyone if she changed my name at the same time she changed hers. I didn’t even know until I was twelve a person has a right to know their own name.”

“Chandi Taylor does sound better than Chandi Pepperidge,” I said.

“Doesn’t it?”

She actually smiled.

A bitter trail of mistaken assumptions wound its way into my stomach. If I’d met this Chandi my first day, the ones that came after would have been a lot different. I thought about her name in my phone, listed as an enemy right behind Brooks, and decided to move it when we were done with whatever this was. She might not be a friend, but she wasn’t really an enemy other than the one I’d made of her.

How much of what I thought I knew had been shaped by the order in which I’d met the people who had told it to me? I had to wonder if I would have despised Chandi so much if I’d spoken to her or Jordan before Abigail-not-Abby’s opinions determined my own.

“Just so you know, last night … it wasn’t on purpose. I was there with a friend. Brooks didn’t ask me to meet him there, and I didn’t go looking for him. That’s actually the opposite of what I intended last night.”

“I know,” she said. “Brooks told me.”

“You talked to him?”

“He told me about the hospital.”

Low self-esteem or self-delusion or whatever is normal for someone who takes the same piece of trash back over and over and over. This was more than that.

“He’s worried about you,” Chandi said.

“Sure he is.”

“He is. And I’m sure it only got worse today when you showed up like this. He just can’t decide if it was because of your cousin, Dex, or a combination of the two.”

“Dex is nothing.”

“Dex is slime, but he’s not nothing, and pretending he is has caused at least a quarter of these.”

She twisted her wrists in the air.

“No one noticed when things went bad for me. I pasted on a smile and pretended the world hadn’t changed. Considering the makeover, I’m guessing you weren’t planning on doing the same.”

“That had nothing to do with Dex.”

“Really? How’d you bruise your knuckles?” she asked, with the smug half-smile I was getting used to seeing when she thought she’d scored a point.

“What did he do to you?” I asked, instead of answering. I stashed my hands behind my back so she couldn’t keep staring at them.

“Made the same assumption everyone does—only last summer, he tried to act on it. I told him I wasn’t interested, but he didn’t believe me. So I thought if I told him the truth he’d make one of his usual jokes and forget it. I thought he was the guy Brooks said he was. I even tried to laugh it off, I told him I wasn’t worth the trouble because, small as she is, Jordan’s the jealous type. But it only made things worse.”

Okay, so I apparently knew all of
nothing
about Channing Pepperidge. Even less about Chandi Taylor.

“You and J—”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You’re … I mean, Jordan is … You and Jordan are …”

“Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever induced stammering before. Interesting effect.”

“Sorry, I just thought—”

“That I was straight?”

“Dating Brooks,” I said.

“That’s the general idea.”

“It’s an act?”

If it was, then every assumption I made about the way he treated his girlfriend, which was based on his interaction with Chandi, was wrong. Some of Brucey’s insights about Jordan’s responses to Dex also made a lot more sense.

“One that’s had many repeat performances and multiple curtain calls.” She raised her hand like we used to in Girl Scouts to recite the oath. “Brooks Walden is not now, nor will he ever be, my boyfriend.”

“But …”

“Brooks and I have known each other since we were kids; our families are old money. A century ago, we’d probably have
been engaged from birth, but best friends is as far as it’s ever gone. We’ve got a lot in common, including the fact that we both like girls.”

“He knows?”

“Since I was fourteen. Brooks is my social armor. We have a sort of unofficial deal. So long as it looked like we’re paired off, my parents don’t know anything different, and no one whispers. Dex did his best to ruin that as soon as he found out.”

“Brooks is pretending to be your boyfriend?”

I don’t know why I kept asking that. It wasn’t really a difficult concept to grasp, aside from admitting that if he’d run interference for Chandi, he had to be a decent guy who actually cared about his friend and wanted to help her for that reason alone. My brain kept kicking the assumption out as bad data.

“Was.” She nodded. “Until yesterday. Jordan’s been after me to tell my mom and stepdad for months. She thinks it’ll muzzle Dex if he doesn’t have leverage.”

“They didn’t take it well?”

She picked at the button on her shirt cuff.

“I … I actually never got that far.”

She backed against the sink and pulled her weight onto the counter so her feet could swing off the floor. My exit was clear, but I’d lost the desire to run.

“You’re new here,” she said. “And you’re new money—don’t take that as an insult; it’s just context. You don’t know what it’s like living in a world where the rules of behavior are five decades behind the curve. I was going to tell my mom … I really was … but then I was there in the house, and she was chattering on the phone to one of her friends about some upcoming charity thing and how I’d be bringing this ‘lovely young man’
as my escort, and I panicked. I was stupid. I thought I could beg some sense into Dex. When that didn’t work, I offered to bribe him.”

Knowing how Dex responded to mentions of his net worth, that couldn’t have gone over well.

Chandi wiped her nose with the back of her hand, which only made the open slice run faster. I fixed her another paper towel, took a seat beside her on the sink, and put enough pressure on her arm to stop the bleeding.

“Thanks,” she said sheepishly, and took the towel from me. “Until then, Dex and I were on even ground. He couldn’t out me without falling off Brooks’ friend list for the betrayal, and I couldn’t tell Brooks what a worthless parasite Dex was without him airbrushing my orientation onto T-shirts and handing them out for souvenirs. So long as there was threat of mutual social annihilation, we hovered.”

“But then you tried to bribe him …”

She nodded, scrubbing the wet towel over her arm.

“The power balance shifted. Dex said he’d agree not to tell anyone I was a lesbian, but first I had to prove it so he wouldn’t be lying if someone asked. Prove it once a week for three months.”

“You didn’t—”

“I ran,” she said, lobbing the wadded-up towel into the trash can. “And gave myself a set of new lines. That was yesterday.”

“Is that why you were crying when you came out of the fun house?”

“You saw that?”

She froze but forced herself to breathe.

“I went to Brooks, like I always do when things are too hard
for me, but I couldn’t say it out loud. He took me out there to cheer me up, not realizing we were entering enemy territory. I tried to keep the act up, but those stupid fun house lights did me in. You can wash blood out of fabric, but let it hit a black light and the stain still shows. Jordan saw them and refused to let up until I told her why I’d cut again. When I finally told her, she said that no matter what she’d promised, it was time to do something about Dex, so she told Brooks everything she knew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Useless words, aren’t they?”

“But they help, in a weird way.”

“Yeah, they do. Don’t worry about me, I’ve got my credits; I only have to last the rest of the year, then I’m off to whichever school is farthest from here to start my own life. Brooks has sheltered me long enough.”

No wonder she was so loyal to him.

Chandi stood up and started replacing her blazer to regulation, making sure she’d removed all traces of blood.

“Chandi … there’s something I have to tell you about Brooks.”

“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. You need to go home. Take it from someone who knows exactly how well running doesn’t work—go home. That’s where you should be. Don’t worry about trig or school or anything else that will still be here to deal with when you’ve got a clear head.”

She unlocked the door and pushed it open.

“And for what it’s worth, you look better with the black hair.”

She winked, and then she was gone, leaving me sitting on
the sink wearing Claire’s uniform and the face I used to find familiar.

Maybe Chandi was right. I’d been beating myself up trying to control the uncontrollable and it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Life isn’t like the movies; we don’t get the hero speech at the end of the third act, or the rally of friends that forms to help us right the wrongs we’ve been forced to endure. Sometimes, instead of the dramatic exit and swelling music cue, the heroine has to walk out of a bathroom alone so she can go home to mourn the one she couldn’t save.

Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen decided against the church and chose to use the stone pavilion at the cemetery instead. It’s not like they suddenly turned atheist or railed at God for Claire dying, though they could have done that, I guess.… They weren’t around a lot between the hospital and the funeral. I’m not really sure what they did. All I know is that they chose the pavilion because it was more Claire than being inside a building with four walls, dark wood, and the scent of candles left over from the last Mass.

Perpetual Hope, which is a horrible name for a cemetery, was the color green you usually see on a golf course. The pavilion with its white stone columns and carved angels sat in the center so that the graves fanned out in all directions. Death on all sides … Claire would’ve hated that.