Tease(20)

In fact, just as I’m apologizing for forgetting best-friend Owen, Alex whips his head around and starts to ask about the party again. “Owen lives in Lincoln, Mom! That’s only an hour away!”

“I know, I know,” she says. I don’t think she’s heard a word he’s said all morning—it’s dangerously close to eight, so I know she’s just desperate to get to work. I’ve poured the cereal for Alex and Tommy, who isn’t nearly as chatty. In fact, I’ve had a hard time even meeting his eye. I guess regular camp wasn’t as awesome as baseball camp. Canoeing and archery clearly don’t match the magic that is Owen Beehner’s curveball.

“So can we invite him? Can we? Can we?”

Mom doesn’t even answer him this time. She looks at me and asks wearily, “You have them until Maggie gets here, right?”

I nod. Maggie’s the babysitter, the one who watches the boys when they’re not in camp. It should be me; I’ve been on duty for most of the other summers since the divorce. But this time I have school. And Natalie. And Teresa. Every time Mom says Maggie’s name she looks kind of angry, and I know she’s thinking that it’s just another thing we can’t afford.

I think Mom believes that I didn’t do anything wrong in this whole Emma thing. Or not wrong enough for criminal prosecution, anyway. But costing us money we don’t have, messing up my college admissions, not being around for the boys? Wrong enough.

Yet another reason I just can’t feel that bad about Emma. If she’d just sucked it up—or, whatever, gotten help, taken her meds, done anything else besides what she did—everything would be normal now. And anyway, if what we all did was so horrible, why didn’t we get sued when Emma was still alive?

Tommy picks up his bowl and drops it into the kitchen sink with a clatter, then runs back upstairs to his room without a word. Alex and I raise our eyebrows at each other, but Mom’s already gone, so she misses the whole thing. I hear the garage door rolling up and, with a sigh, I grab my own bowl, washing it along with my brother’s. Alex starts talking about another baseball game, a professional one, I think. I try to pretend I’m listening while I gather up my summer school books and stuff them into my bag.

The day turns out to be one of those pointless-at-every-turn ones. Carmichael hasn’t shown up for classes, which isn’t a surprise (though I’m a little surprised that I seem to care whether or not he’s here). I get to Natalie’s office for our appointment at three but she’s not there, some emergency or something, her assistant won’t tell me anything more than that the appointment’s cancelled and they’re sorry they didn’t call me. So I have forty-five minutes to kill before my appointment with Therapist Teresa. I could go to Starbucks and spend my last five dollars on some coffee. Or I could do something really stupid.

I pick stupid.

The aisles at the Albertsons supermarket are so cold that goose pimples spring up on my arms the second I walk through the door. At the entrance there are mountains of flower displays. There aren’t any holidays coming up, so all the balloons are variations on either HAPPY BIRTHDAY or CONGRATULATIONS. Past that is the produce, regular and organic. Or if you turn left, like I’m doing now, you get to the cash registers.

I just make eye contact with him for a second—he looks up as I’m walking by the express register at the end, where he’s checking out an old woman with what look like lemons. I don’t glance over long enough to see more than a flash of yellow and that he’s seen me, he’s looking back at me. There’s a nod.

I keep walking, all the way down to register fifteen, the ATMs, and the start of the bakery section. I turn again, right this time, down the coldest aisle of all, the one with the ice cream and frozen pizza. At the fish I turn left. There’s a little hallway that leads to a door. The EMERGENCY ONLY sign is just a sign—there’s no alarm. I push through and find myself at the back corner of the building, near some Dumpsters but not so close that you can smell them. A few milk crates sit around, cigarette butts fanned out on the ground beneath them. I’m alone. I find a spot along the concrete-brick wall and lean back and wait.

Maybe three minutes later, not even long enough for the chill of the store to fade from my arms, Dylan is there, pushing the door open and striding over to me. We don’t say anything. I know he’s taken his ten-minute break, I know we aren’t going to talk. He presses me closer to the wall, so close I can feel the clip on his name tag digging into my chest a little, like a pinch, and we kiss, and the frozen-food-aisle chill melts from my limbs.

It hangs on in my heart, though. I kiss and kiss him, and he holds me, and it feels good. But it doesn’t sink in.

“Okay. We have a solid argument that the antidepressants Miss Putnam was taking have been linked to other suicides. We have the doctor who can testify to that. But what’s still killing us is the stalking charge. We just don’t have a good plan for that.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure about the online stuff, I still have more research to do there. But for the rest—Miss Putnam lived down the street from Mr. Chang, right? So an argument could be made—”

“I thought of that. But Miss Wharton here and Mr. Chang weren’t really that close. Isn’t that right?”

Natalie and the hot law student intern turn to me, eyebrows raised. I shrug in answer to Natalie’s question. No, “Mr. Chang” and I weren’t that close. I always thought Tyler Chang was kind of a tool, even before Emma’s parents filed charges against him, even before we found out what happened that last weekend. He was always partying with Emma like it was no big deal, because he could; she was convenient, too—they were three houses away from each other. He’d hang out with her and post it all online like it was something to be proud of, even while he made fun of her behind her back with the rest of us.