Premeditated (8 page)

“No wonder the Cuckoo bird fell for him—he’s hot.”

“Stop it,” I ordered as I climbed back into the front seat. “There will be no lusting after evil incarnate.”

“That’s not fair.” Tabs slipped into the most annoying mock-whine you could imagine. “You know I’ve had a crush on you since fifth grade.”

“I’m not evil, I’m committed.”

“Yes, you very well could be.”

“Shut up.”

“Fine. I’ll keep my fantasies in my head. Brucey wanted me to ask you if he can have the uniform when you’re done with it.”

Not likely. I planned on giving it a Viking funeral in Uncle Paul’s pool.

“You told Brucey? Are you crazy?”

When you’re keeping secrets, a self-professed anarchist who believes password-protected files are the seeds of a totalitarian regime is not the guy you tell said secrets to.

“He knows the cover story. Oh—and he hates you a little for picking this place over Ninth Street. But he says he’ll be fine.”

“Why does he want Claire’s uniform?”

“He needs another prep school costume for his film project. Apparently yours is more authentic than the ones he made himself.”

The line started moving again.

“I am not using my cousin’s uniform to do porn, Tabs.”

“He doesn’t want you, just the skirt.”

“When I’m done, he’s welcome to the ashes.”

“When you’re done, it’ll be in an evidence locker as property of the state.”

“I don’t plan on getting caught.”

“We’re going to end up on one of those ‘ripped from the headlines’ shows, aren’t we?”

“You wanted in.”

“Remind me to block your cell when we get to the hospital.”

Trinity didn’t really look like a hospital on the bottom floor, more like a hotel lobby, with squishy couches and coffee tables covered with magazines; it even smelled like potpourri. If it weren’t for the wall-mounted television that doubled as a call system for families waiting for people in surgery, it would have almost been comfortable.

The main hall was carpeted green, with flower-covered rugs every five feet or so. Paintings lined the wall on one side, with visuals for the twenty-third psalm in the spaces between.

Tabs and I paused between the multicultural group hug for “Goodness and Mercy” and the watercolor painting of a country church labeled the “The House of the Lord” and waited for the elevator. Claire was considered in serious condition but no longer ICU material, so we had to go to the fourth floor. The doctors weren’t planning to move her to the psych ward on five until she was awake and lucid enough to speak to a counselor, though they told Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul to be prepared for her not remembering much. With any luck, they’d be right, and the amnesia would wipe Brooks away, too.

The elevator opened into the ninety-first psalm. I wasn’t sure where the other sixty-odd psalms went, but they hadn’t made an appearance anywhere in the hospital that I’d seen, and I had pretty much committed the entire floor plan to memory.

“Which way?” Tabs asked

“End of the right hall.”

Technically, Claire’s room was number 419. Unofficially, the staff called it the Angel Room, because instead of a window at the bend in the hall, there was a huge painting of a fiery man with wings standing guard outside her door. Uncle Paul, who knows these kinds of things, said it was a painting of St. Michael, who knocked Satan out of heaven. I took that as a good sign. Mitch, as I called him, certainly looked like he was capable of protecting a fifteen-year-old kid. If he’d already defeated the devil once, maybe he could do it again.

“Hey, Mitch.” I slapped the painting’s frame with my open palm on the way into the infection-fighting icebox that was Claire’s room.

I hated the cold, but not the air conditioner. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a tiny two-room apartment, or a mansion, or a hospital on death watch, the scent coming off an air conditioner is the same; there’s something comforting in the continuity of that. I leaned against the window that couldn’t open in Claire’s room, with the heat through the glass warming my back and the arctic air from the AC flowing down from the vent above my head, and let the smell convince me that everything was okay. That the chill that stole the last bit of natural warmth from my body was nothing but a side effect of the thermostat being set too low.

“She looks better,” Tabs said in the way people do when they really mean “is she even breathing.”

In that moment, I knew I’d be forever grateful to her for making me change clothes in the car. It was hard enough not to
throw up in jeans and a T-shirt; if I’d walked into that room wearing Claire’s uniform, the nurses would have seen the Lowry School’s lunch menu firsthand.

Claire didn’t look better; she looked pale. And Claire
never
looked pale. She was never inside long enough for “pale” to apply. This was a sick color, pasty—the shade reserved for someone who didn’t have enough blood in her body.

Tabs drifted away to one of the chairs in the room and began the traditional search for reading material that always happens inside a hospital. (If you’ve never seen a teenage girl with four facial piercings, another seven in her ears, black and purple hair, and combat boots paired with spiked jewelry flipping through a DIY mag dedicated to making animal-shaped snack foods, you don’t know what weird looks like.)

I took one of Claire’s cold, gauze-wrapped hands and bent over her bed.

“I found him, Cuckoo,” I said. “Feel free to thrash me for getting into your business, but I had to. I’ll make this better.”

Tabs snorted from her seat across the room; she tried to cover the sound by holding up her magazine and pointing to a picture of a chocolate cat with licorice whiskers. “They put pudding in it,” she said.

“I think rich people must be obsessed with windows, because Lowry has them in every room, even the principal’s office.”

“Now I want pudding,” Tabs announced behind me. That was her way of telling me that if I could hear her, she could hear me, and she didn’t want to eavesdrop.

“Don’t be mad at me for using your clothes,” I told Claire. “I didn’t so much as spill a soda on them or drop ketchup at
lunch. I was careful.… Well, there may be grass splotches on your socks, but we’ll just call it an even trade for all the times you stretched out my stuff with your insanely mature figure, okay?”

Though if she’d wanted to wake up right there and argue the point, I wouldn’t have minded.

According to the doctors, that’s what we were waiting on. The waking-up part, not the yelling. Claire hadn’t done enough damage with her razor to actually kill herself. When she cut her wrists, she did it like they show on TV—a side-to-side slash over the blue line. It only took a few stitches to close, and she barely nicked the vein at all. Anyone who really wants to end it knows that won’t work.

Sometimes it’s tempting
.

At least, it used to be. If I cut myself now, everyone would blame Claire for it. They’d say I got the idea from her, that I was so upset I didn’t know what I was doing. But if anyone hadn’t known what she was doing, it was Claire. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been barefoot, and she wouldn’t have slipped when her blood pressure crashed. She wouldn’t have bounced her head off the sink, then the tile, hard enough to crack her skull.

When Uncle Paul called and told Dad that Claire was in the hospital with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, I asked him if it was a brown recluse, because they get into the houses around here and hide in the corners. I thought she had a spider bite.

“They keep giving me your stuff at school; it’s weird. All the papers and forms they gave me to get signed say ‘Claire Reed’ on them, like we’re interchangeable or something. Don’t worry, I’m not going all changeling on you. I don’t want your life.”

Truthfully, I wouldn’t have minded a time-share on it sometimes, but I didn’t want it all to myself. I wanted my Cuckoo back.

“I’m going to steal pudding. I can’t plot with low blood sugar,” Tabs blurted.

In her head, I’m sure that sounded better than “I’m going to escape awkwardly while you talk to the vegetable.” She darted out the door before I could agree or argue or even ask her to remember that I hated chocolate.

With Tabs out of the way, I went to the table and upended my school bag.

“I brought you some cherry lip gloss. They said your lips could get all cracked being in here so long, and they don’t have any good stuff.” I uncapped the tube and held it close to her nose. “Smell familiar?”

There was no answer, but I kept hoping. She didn’t even flinch when I ran the gloss over her lips.

“Please hang around to yell at me for doing something so stupid as trying to pull this off, Cuckoo. I’ll never learn my lesson if you don’t, and who knows … I might decide to make it a habit or something. Going around, pretending to be random people.”

It was kind of nice not having to be myself, or even try to figure out what that meant, but it was frustrating, too. It had only been one day, but I thought if I made myself as close to a copy of Claire as possible, Brooks would at least give me a sign that he was interested. I should have been his type.

“He’s not taking the bait as quick as I’d hoped. I thought I did everything. I changed my hair and my clothes. I’m working
on the personality, I swear. I even try to smile when I think about it—”

“Mission accomplished.” Tabs popped back in with a dinner-tray consisting of three pudding cups, a bowl of blue Jell-O, and two plastic-wrapped spork packets complete with salt, pepper, and sugar.

“Tell me you didn’t loot the pediatric ward’s dessert cart.”

“I got them in the hall,” Tabs said. “They were clearing lunch trays, and it looks like no one on this floor likes pudding.”

“You stole used food that’s been in rooms with sick people?”

“Still sealed.” She flipped one upside down and shook it. “Besides, some insurance company is paying like twelve bucks for this pudding. This way, they get their money’s worth.”

“Do you see what happens when you leave me alone?” I asked Claire. “I have to go in search of a new Jiminy Cricket to be my conscience, and all I can find is the dessert thief.”

“I found a strawberry,” Tabs sang, jiggling a pink pudding cup in my direction.

“You’d better snap out of this soon, Cuckoo, or else you’ll come home and find all your pretty pastels replaced with kohl and red and purple. I’m serious.”

I reached for her hand again and curled her limp little finger around my own.

“There. It’s been pinky sworn, and I have a witness, so no use trying to wriggle out of the deal by claiming you were unconscious and didn’t know what you were agreeing to. Now I have to go eat the evidence of Tabs’ culinary crime spree.” I leaned over the bed rail and kissed her forehead, careful not to jostle the bandages wrapped around her head.

“What is all this stuff?” Tabs was trying to navigate the mess I’d made out of my messenger bag when I dumped it on the table.

“Lowry’s new student endurance challenge.”

She picked up the folder Headmistress Kuykendall had given me that morning and flipped through the pages of things I had to get signed while I shoved the books away to make us a clear space to eat on.

“Have you actually read this thing?” she asked.

“I only got it this morning, and it’s the student handbook, so … no.” No one reads those things.

“First of all, this is
not
a student handbook. It’s the school’s honor code.” She pulled a sheet of rose-colored paper out of the folder and held it up. “It’s a contract between the students and school, signed by them and their parents, and submitted as a binding obligation of enrollment. Don’t look at me like that, I read it straight off the page.”

Tabs coasted the blue Jell-O across the table to me.

“Put it back before you get pudding on it.” I had no desire to turn in my forms on their fancy, crinkly paper covered in brown spots and reeking of hospital chocolate.

“It’s part of their disciplinary code, D. They don’t want to get embarrassed if anyone does something stupid, so they handle it in-house.”

“And?”

“And being the idyllic little military state that it is, Lowry operates on the principal of ‘spy on thy neighbor and rat him out.’ ”

“Meaning what?”

Tabs began reading from the contract again. “ ‘Any allegation
of wrongdoing found to be of suitable merit shall be investigated to the full extent of the power and influence granted the school and its Board of Regents.’ ”

“I say again—meaning what?”

“If the school gets a viable tip that a specific student or students are using, then they have the right to demand an immediate drug test. Signing the contract forfeits your right to refuse on pain of expulsion.”

“ ‘Viable tip’ as in even if it’s anonymous?”

“Isn’t zero tolerance wonderful? No pesky fact-checking or assumptions of innocence to deal with.”

“But what good will a test do unless he’s actually on something?” I asked. “It’s not like we can hold him down and force-feed him ecstasy.”

“Did you know my mother is an asthmatic?”

That was a random shift, even for Tabs.

“Your mother’s a hypochondriac.”

“This is true,” Tabs said. “However, one of her current hypochondrial conditions is asthma. And since doctors learned many years ago that she was never quite so sick as she appeared, they stopped giving her prescription meds.”

“Fascinating.”

“It is—really. Especially the part where she decided that Western medicine had it in for her and started seeing an acupuncturist instead of a regular doctor.”

“This is one of those conversations that sounded right in your head, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But it will also make sense to you in about three seconds when I mention ma huang.”

“Who’s that? The acupuncturist?”

“It’s an herb, genius, not a person. Specifically, it’s the herb said acupuncturist gives my mother for her hypochondrial asthma.”

“And?”

“And, she stopped taking it when her company ordered blood tests for their employees and hers spiked for amphetamines.”

“It made her fail a drug test?”