White Rabbit(94)
The sound of the collision is deafening—a hideous detonation of glass, metal, and plastic collapsing in the blink of an eye—the car flipping up and swinging wide, tossed sideways by its own momentum. It bangs down hard, the quarter panels raking loudly against the trees, and finally settles at an angle in the ditch. The air reeks of gasoline and oil and heat, and I drag myself up from my watery berth like a zombie freeing himself from the grave.
I think I half expect Peyton to somehow kick her way out of the wreckage like the Terminator, rifle aloft, still determined to finish things; but my fears are unfounded. In her haste to run me down, she never put on her seat belt. Struggling to stand on feet I can’t even feel, I see where she rocketed halfway through the windshield—where she now lies sprawled across the Camaro’s hood, blood and glass decorating her hair, her body ruined.
Peyton Forsyth is dead.
ONE MONTH LATER
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” my mother says with an ingenuousness that is not the least bit convincing. Two minutes earlier, Sebastian and I had been making out on the floor of the living room, our shirts cast aside, and I was very excited by the telltale hardness I felt against my hip when he shifted subtly on top of me. Then the front door rattled and popped open, my mom calling out an improbable “Yoo-hoo, it’s just me!” and we’d scrambled to dress and reorganize ourselves in the thirty seconds that passed before she sauntered into the room with a sly grin on her face.
“No, Mrs.—uh, Genevieve,” Sebastian stammers nervously, his face adorably flushed with embarrassment. “We were just watching a movie.”
Mom takes in the TV screen at a glance. “Ooh, Friday the 13th! This is part … seven, right? The psychic girl who throws stuff around with her mind?” She flops down into our easy chair, settling herself and giving Sebastian a broad wink. “You don’t mind if I join you guys, do you? Part seven is my favorite.”
I offer her a resentful scowl, my erection practically making a slide whistle noise as it deflates beneath the popcorn bowl I brilliantly used to disguise it when she made her entrance. On the screen, Jason—the hockey-masked killer—impales the teenage protagonist’s mother with a scythe, and I announce pointedly, “What a coincidence—this is my favorite part.”
Sebastian nods vigorously, too preoccupied with his attempt at acting casual—pressing an old copy of Elle Decor across his lap, like that’s fooling anybody—to notice my sarcasm. The nice thing is, he’s still sitting right next to me, our legs brushing together as we pretend to be engrossed in a movie we’ve both seen about a billion times. It’s taken a while to get to this point, where he doesn’t reflexively pull away whenever someone catches us touching or holding hands, and the feeling is good. I like the closeness—the not having to worry anymore about how people will react.
After I crawled back up onto the road that night, broken twigs jutting out from my bloodied flesh like a botanical experiment gone hideously awry, I somehow managed to stumble all the way to the emergency phone and call 911. The first responders wanted to put me into an ambulance the second they saw me, but I refused; first, I led them all the way to where Sebastian was lying among the reeds—gray-faced and unconscious but still breathing—and then I collapsed.
Sebastian, Race, and I were all taken to the same hospital; all three of us were questioned thoroughly by the authorities, and all three of us were ultimately sent home. I don’t know what version of the night’s events Sebastian told the cops—if it even matched mine in the slightest—but I doubt it mattered. The entire affair was a PR nightmare for the authorities, with several notable families involved in a high-profile scandal of drugs and murder and arson, and we were handing them a closed case on a silver platter. Three eyewitnesses and a dead suspect made the case open and shut, and I think they were relieved to turn a blind eye to all our lying and dissembling.
“I thought you were supposed to be meeting with a potential client or something,” I say to my mother, hinting rather obviously that she should leave again.
“I am,” she answers, “but I had a few minutes, and I thought I’d stop at home first to see how my boys were doing. I know you can’t cook anything that doesn’t have microwave instructions, so I got some of those frozen pizza rolls you two like so much. That way I know you won’t starve to death.”
“Ha ha.” I roll my eyes.
“You two have any plans for the evening?”
“Sort of?” Sebastian looks around the room at nobody in particular. “My friend Jake is having a birthday party tonight, so we thought, uh … you know, we might go to that. If that’s okay?”
Many of Sebastian’s friends have actually been pretty cool with the news that he’s dating a guy—less so with the news that said guy is me, as I had predicted, but we’re working on it. Jake Fuller is probably Sebastian’s best friend these days, and as the self-coronated Party King of Ethan Allen High, he’s already guaranteed us a few opportunities—like tonight—to road-test public opinions on our relationship. With my worst enemies at Ethan Allen out of the picture for good, attitudes toward me are proving more malleable than they’ve ever been before, and guys who’ve passively made my life crap in the past are actually willing to speak to me in a pseudo-friendly way all of a sudden. It takes all my strength of character to be grudgingly civil to most of them, but, like I said: We’re working on it.