Save Yourself (13 page)

“Gorgeous,” Layla said, looking pleased.

Justinian gave Verna a graphic novel; the cover showed a girl leaping from a stone tower, a thick mane of silver-streaked burgundy hair streaming behind her. “That’s the Sorceress,” he said. “Her hair turned silver when she threw herself from the top of the tower. Then she fought her way back from the land of the dead, and now she’s immortal. You should read it.”

His own hair was as black as anthracite coal, his eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s. Verna was fascinated and slightly awestruck by him, and she gripped the glossy book tightly as Layla drove her home. Her nostrils were still filled with the smell of hair dye and her eyes felt sticky and weird under her makeup. As she snuck peeks at herself in the side mirror, her unease grew. The closer they got to the house, the stronger it became. When Layla stopped at the corner and told her to get out, Verna blanched.

“You’re not making me go in there by myself,” she said, trembling at the very thought, but Layla only said, “Surely the Sorceress isn’t afraid. Should I tell Justinian he picked out the wrong colors for you?”

So into the house Verna went. Her own reflection in the front hall mirror stopped her. She just had time to wonder if she shouldn’t at least have taken off the makeup when she heard a gasp and looked up to see Dad staring at her, his eyes wide with shock.

“Oh, Verna,” he said. “Oh, no.”

Dinner was awful. Dad stared down at his plate with profound and silent disappointment while Mother sawed angrily at her pork chop, the knife grating on the stoneware with a horrible screech. They mostly seemed to be angry with Layla. As if Verna herself wasn’t responsible for the decisions she made. As if she was a doll that Layla had ruined. As if she was
their
doll.

“When your sister gets home,” Mother said, leaving the threat unfinished as she stabbed fiercely at a piece of spinach. “When I get hold of her.”

Verna had never disappointed her parents before, not once. Her anger fluttered and burned in her chest.

Upstairs doing her homework, the vocab sentences were easy and the algebra was hard and as she factored equations and solved for variables, her indignation surged and roiled. Because when Layla had cut off her corn-silk hair and dyed it black, it had been just one link in a long chain of broken curfews and immodest hems and inappropriate eye makeup. “I hope you’re happy,” Mother had said through her tears. “You look just as ugly as you’ve been acting.” But here Verna sat at her desk, ceramic praying hands on the wall above her. She’d be in bed by ten that night and awake by seven the next morning, when she’d wash the breakfast dishes before nagging Layla into her car so they wouldn’t be late. After school she’d start the laundry and dust the living room and six weeks from now she’d bring home a straight-A report card and none of that counted with her parents. All they saw was their little broken doll with the wrong color hair.

In the window over her desk, the two silver streaks and the black holes of her thick-lined eyes stared back at her. That face might be unfamiliar but at least she knew it was hers. It was her own.

Somebody tapped on her closed door. Her father. “Can we talk?” he said.

Verna nodded, and he sat down on her bed. His hair was thinning on top, but what was left was the same color hers had been, four hours earlier. Behind his glasses, his eyes looked tired. “So, was the hair your sister’s idea?”

“No.” Verna wasn’t lying. It had been Justinian’s idea, Layla had said; he’d chosen the colors. “Nobody made me do it. I wanted to.”

“I’m sure you did. Have you thought about why?”

“Why not? It’s not like it was anything special the way it was.”

He winced. “Verna, honey, everything about you is special.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Do you know why I think you did it?”

No, but I bet you’re going to tell me
, Layla’s imaginary voice said.

“I think you miss your sister,” he said. “I think now that you’re both at the same school, you’re starting to realize how far apart you’ve grown, and you want to make it better. So you start dressing like her, and dyeing your hair the way she does, because you think that maybe if she doesn’t want to be like you, you can be like her, and then you’ll be friends again, like you used to be.”

When Layla had been golden and shining and Verna had been her faint, silent shadow. They had more in common now than they’d ever had then.

“Really, I think all of this is coming from your heart,” Dad said. “Your good, sweet, loving heart.”

Her good, sweet, loving heart, that wished daggers and poison and death on Kyle Dobrowski every day.

“But here’s the problem, Verna. Layla’s in a dangerous place right now. And I love you for going there to find her, but I’m not sure you can bring her back and I don’t want you getting stuck there, too. I don’t want to lose both of my girls.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. She wanted to tell him: what school was like, what Layla was like, what she, herself, was like. What the world
was like, because she was starting to wonder if he knew. All she could say was “Neither of us is lost.”

“Layla has to come back on her own, honey,” he said, shaking his head. “And we can be there for her when she does, we can welcome her and make it as easy as possible for her, but we can’t make her come. I know you want to help her, but you’re not going to help her by letting her push you into being somebody you’re not.”

It was hopeless. She tried to smile. “Dad, I’m still me. I just have more interesting hair.”

“I liked your hair the way God made it.” He stood up. “Look, I can’t tell you to stay away from your sister. I’m not sure I would if I could, but I know I can’t. Will you make me a promise, though? Will you listen to God before you listen to her?”

He’d always told her that God spoke deep in her heart, and that she would know what He wanted her to do because it would feel right and everything else would feel wrong. Nodding, right now, felt wrong. She did it anyway.

“That’s my good girl,” Dad said. “You know I’ll always love you, no matter what, right?”

“What about Layla?” Verna said.

He blinked, and then smiled. “Yes, Layla, too, although I’ll admit that she doesn’t always make it easy.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of Layla, do you know where she is tonight?”

“I think she’s at Brittany’s,” she said. “I think they’re doing homework.”

Although it occurred to her, after the door was closed, that Dad just needed to check the GPS website to see that she was lying—but the only computer in the house was the one in the office, and she didn’t hear him go in there, not for the rest of the night. As she fell asleep, she found herself thinking about what she would be like, if she were the person that Kyle Dobrowski and Brad Anastero liked to tell her she was. Her dreams were troubling and strange. When she woke up her pillowcase was stained with hair dye and Mother was furious.

·   ·   ·

The next day, Justinian gave her a bracelet, black leather with a silver ring attached to the outside of it. It was like the one the Sorceress wore in the comic. “I got it at a convention a few months ago,” he said. “I was going to give it to Layla, but for some reason I never did. Then, last night, I found it. I think it was meant for you.” She was surprised that he thought of her at all, so she let him fasten it around her wrist. The leather was stiff and tight, almost uncomfortable. It was like being held in somebody’s fist. As the day passed she decided she liked it. It rubbed a bit, and it smelled of new leather and solvent, but it was a reminder: there were places in the world that weren’t the bio lab, people in the world that weren’t Kyle Dobrowski and Calleigh Brinker.

She wore the bracelet to Worship Group on Wednesday night. The group met in the Elsheres’ basement and there were no pews, just folding chairs and a crucifix and an old
Twilight Zone
pinball machine that hadn’t ever worked. Layla sat on top of the pinball machine, as she always did—Dad said the important thing was that she came—picking her fingernails and looking aloof, but Verna sat in one of the chairs arranged in loose concentric circles around the room. Normally she sat next to one of her parents, but this time she chose the chair closest to Layla. Around her were faces that were as much a part of her history as her own flesh. She’d gone to church camps and weekend retreats with Jenna Latshaw and the Costa twins; she’d helped babysit the little ones, the Czerpak kids—before Ryan died—and the Ferarrini kids and Debbie Mayerchek’s little boy, Jayden. Last week she’d worn a pink blouse and a flowered skirt to Worship Group, and now she wore her kitty-skull T-shirt and fishnet stockings and boots and none of them would look at her. It was as if she gave off some kind of polarity that repelled direct eye contact. When they looked in her direction, their gazes just sort of slipped away.

Verna cast a stealthy glance over her shoulder, trying to catch Layla’s eye, but Layla was hunched into herself, staring down at her
own crossed ankles. The Black Sabbath shirt Layla wore wasn’t what she’d worn to school. Verna hadn’t ever seen it before, but it didn’t look new. The black cotton had faded to a musty gray, and the image of four scowling men on the front was crazed and worn, their long painted hair chipped around the edges. Their faces made Verna think of Justinian. Mother and Dad had made much of the shirt at dinner. Apparently Dad had once owned one like it.

“Your father used to be the world’s biggest Sabbath fan,” Mother had said.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Layla said. “The first thing I wear in months that you haven’t hated reminds you of your bad old days of sin and damnation.”

Dad said, “It’s our youth that we’re remembering fondly, not Ozzy Osbourne. Where did you find that, anyway?”

“A friend gave it to me,” Layla said.

What friend? Verna wondered now. She tried to imagine Justinian wearing the shirt, but it was too ragged. Justinian’s clothes never looked worn. The shirt he’d worn that day had been intense black, the red lettering crisp.
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all
. Thinking of it now Verna shivered.

Meanwhile, Dad finished talking about this week’s Bible verse, and asked if anybody had anything they wanted to share. There was a smattering of the usual stuff: someone’s friend had cancer, somebody’s brother lost his job, someone’s troubled niece had been packed off to a Christian wilderness camp. The group prayed for them. Verna snuck another look at Layla. She was picking at a hole in her jeans.

“I have something,” Danny Czerpak said. The man who’d hit and killed Ryan with his car had been drunk; he and his sons had waited nineteen hours to report it. Those had been awful hours. Mother and Dad had spent them at the hospital with Danny and Rachel while Verna, at home, had prayed for the impossible, that the boy would live. Now Danny said that he and Rachel had decided to sue the man who’d done it. He was in prison now but he still owned the house
where his sons lived. “It’s not about the money,” he said. “It’s about making those boys understand that what they did was wrong. Other than their father being in prison, their lives haven’t changed at all, and that doesn’t seem right to us.” He cleared his throat, looked at his wife, and said, “So, anyway, I just wanted to ask all of you to pray for us, to help us do the right thing in Christ and for God’s justice to be done. Amen.”

“Amen,” Dad said, gently. So did everybody else.

Layla was chewing a fingernail, and—for some reason—smiling. Faintly, bitterly.

Toby frowned, and shifted, and said, “Are you sure? Romans says, do not take revenge, right? It is mine to avenge, I will repay, says the Lord. Shouldn’t we be trusting Him to punish those guys? I mean, the Bible says”—his tongue stumbled a little over the
B
in
Bible
—“feed our enemies when they’re hungry, do good to those that hate us. You’re talking about taking away everything they have. It’s a serious thing.”

Verna wondered. She spent thirty-five hours a week in school and Kyle, Calleigh, and the rest made her dread almost all of it. They were a weight she could never shake off, a misery that never eased. If she had the chance to punish them, would she be able to leave it up to God? You couldn’t compare a few dirty words to a dead child, you couldn’t. But still. She didn’t know.

Meanwhile, Danny’s fists clenched. “My son is dead,” he said. “Last time I saw him he was wrapped in bandages and I was signing away his organs.”

“Why don’t we give it to God?” Dad said. “Come on, everybody. Let’s pray.”

Afterward, everyone drifted upstairs, where Mother had laid out refreshments. The sticky smells of fruit punch and brown sugar cookies were, for Verna, the smells of church, and the little kids playing tag up and down the hallway were just as they had always been, but nothing else was. Rachel Czerpak stood by the punch bowl, her eyes
red and damp, and watched as her two surviving children romped with the others; Verna could see the grief inside her, the way she felt Ryan among them even though he wasn’t. Verna herself was here but felt like she was elsewhere.

Jenna Latshaw, with the Costa twins in tow, cornered her by the punch bowl. Verna could practically feel their excitement: finally, they had an opportunity to save a falling soul. And not just any soul, but Pastor Jeff’s own daughter. “We’re worried about you,” Jenna said.

“There’s nothing wrong with a little hair dye. I had that pink stripe last year,” Amberleigh Costa said. It was disconcerting, the way she was looking at Verna’s hair instead of her face.

“It’s not the hair dye we’re worried about. It’s what’s behind it.”

“Or who,” Spencer Costa said, sounding ominous. “We think it’s your sister.”

Dad said that they were supposed to do this, to watch out for each other and keep each other on the right path. Across the room, he was watching, and Verna knew that in his eyes the others were reaching out to help bring her back from the edge. Walk with the wise and become wise, and so forth. But the Costas went to a private Christian academy, and Jenna was homeschooled. They weren’t in Biology with her. They weren’t on the tennis courts when Calleigh Brinker practiced her forehand on Verna’s back. They didn’t know what it was like, and they didn’t know Layla, and they didn’t know Verna, either.