White Rabbit(16)
*
On the last Friday in May, I emerged from seventh period like a zombie, the act of putting one foot in front of the other requiring a superhuman effort. I trudged heavily through the halls to the classroom where the writers and editors of the Front Line met after school, and slumped into a chair. There was nothing I wanted less than to spend one more hour sitting in a room full of oblivious people, pretending not to be heartsick and destroyed, but my mom couldn’t pick me up until after the meeting—and it wasn’t as if I’d have felt any less terrible in a different environment.
And there was always the chance, I pathetically allowed myself to believe, that Sebastian would show up this time.
It had been exactly six days and nineteen hours since the last time I’d heard from him—six days and nineteen hours of unanswered texts and phone calls, of obsessively checking his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts for some indication of what he was thinking, of trying to figure out how I could fix whatever I’d done wrong.
I was literally nauseous. We’d been together for four months—four months! The surreptitious smiles when no one else was looking, the heart-pounding kisses stolen in empty hallways or at our secret spot behind the theater, our date nights watching dumb horror movies and eating pizza, making out in his bedroom while his parents thought we were studying for a quiz in biology; it had all been so great and so exciting, an endless series of doors opening onto more meaningful, more important kinds of happiness. How, after all that, could he just shut me out with no explanation?
Sebastian was a no-show at the meeting that day, though, and I placed my cell phone on the desk in front of me where I could see it in case he decided to text, the minutes ticking by unbearably as boring story ideas were pitched, reviewed, and assigned. There was a pep rally taking place in the gym, concurrent with our meeting, and the occasional interruption of cheers and rhythmic foot-stomping underscored our incongruously dull debate over whether it was appropriate for the Front Line to openly criticize the actions of certain faculty members.
Mr. Cohen was in the midst of splitting the finest of ideological hairs, simultaneously extolling the virtues of free speech while imploring us to keep our opinionated pieholes shut, when the urgent and approaching shriek of tennis shoes against linoleum in the hallway outside grabbed our collective attention. Two seconds later, Ramona Waverley—a pushy junior who was inexplicably, fiercely dedicated to the cause of our crappy high school newspaper—exploded into the room. Her face flushed and her eyes wild, she immediately exclaimed, “OMG, you guys! Oh em fucking gee!”
Mr. Cohen frowned with his entire body. “Ramona—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. C.,” she apologized gravely for the profane outburst, “but this is, just, like, I mean. I was at the pep rally, okay? And, like, we have to write about this in the paper, Mr. C., because literally everybody is going to be talking about it!”
“Talking about what, Ramona?”
And so she told us. “Okay, you know how, like, at the rallies, teachers and players get up and say stuff to pump up the crowd? Like, giving speeches and whatever? Well, right after Coach Kowalski spoke, Bash got up and took the microphone—even though he wasn’t supposed to—and right in front of literally everybody, he begged Lia Santos to take him back! He said he’d never stopped loving her, and that breaking up with her four months ago was the biggest mistake he ever made, and then he got down on his knees and asked her to be his girlfriend again! And he actually started crying when she said yes!” Ramona could barely breathe. “It was the most romantic thing ever. Seriously, I almost died. Everybody almost died. This has to be in the paper.”
The room burst into conversation. Some girls up front cooed about how they wished a guy felt about them the way Bash felt about Lia, and a few cynics placed bets on how long this particular on-again phase would last for the mercurial supercouple.
I just stared at my cell phone through a solid, shimmering wall of unshed tears, aware that something meaningful and important had just broken inside of me.
*
Into the dead silence that follows April’s unexpected disclosure, as she avoids looking at Sebastian, and Sebastian avoids looking at me, I speak through wooden lips. “Well, then, I guess our first step is talking to Lia.”
Without another word, I get up from my chair, march to the bedroom door, and stomp out into the wrecked family room, where the air still reeks of Fox’s curdling blood.
5
The effect of my furiously dramatic exit is undercut pretty quickly when I remember that my shoes and tank top are still in the bathroom, and I have to go back and get them. I instruct April to collect her cell phone from the kitchen and, before either Sebastian or I can react, she snatches up a hand towel from the countertop and wipes her prints off the hilt of the knife. Defiantly, she announces, “I’m not going to jail for this. I didn’t kill him, and I’m not going to let anybody frame me for it, either!”
It’s too late to stop her, and I don’t have the energy to speculate about what will happen if the cops learn what she’s done, so we just usher her out of the cottage and down to where Sebastian’s Jeep is parked. As we back our way into a three-point turn, the Whitneys’ cottage looks eerily inhabited, windows spilling warm light onto the porch and bushes, and I can’t suppress a small shiver as I think about what waits inside.