The Cheerleaders(56)
Ginny goes still. “You mean like what we did tonight?”
“I don’t know.” I think of Brandon’s lips on my throat. The look on my mother’s face when my doctor brought her into the exam room. How she asked what I wanted to do. My answer was reflexive; I’d given more deliberation to haircuts.
I swallow. “Do you think doing something shitty is less shitty if you really believe you had no other choice?”
The whistle of the wind in the trees outside Ginny’s window fills the silence in the room.
“Yeah,” she says after a beat. It feels like she wants to say more, but I sense her rolling over from her back to her side and I leave it.
When my eyes flicker open a few hours later, my mouth parched from the hot chocolate, I turn over, not sure how I’ll be able to climb out of bed to find a glass of water without disturbing Ginny. But the space where she fell asleep is empty.
I pad out of the bedroom and into the hall. The door to the room across from Ginny’s is open, the sliver of moonlight coming through the window cast on the vacant bed. Her mom’s room.
The floorboards groan under my feet as I creep toward the end of the hall. I try to make myself weigh nothing as I take baby steps down the stairs. I’m halfway to the bottom when I see a silhouette in the living room’s bay window.
Ginny is sitting on the window seat, angled away from me. Knees pulled up to her chest, arms hugging them as close to her as possible. For some reason, the sight of her sitting there, staring out at the street, her pale skin almost ghastly under the light of the moon, makes me feel like I’ve walked in on someone naked.
I head back up the stairs and down the hall to Ginny’s bedroom. I’ve forgotten why I got up in the first place.
I wake up alone in the bed again. My phone says it’s twenty after seven; Ginny’s mom’s shift at the hospital ends in ten minutes. Ginny would have left to pick her up not too long ago.
I undo my bun and rake my fingers through my hair. My mom said to come straight home when I woke up, and I don’t want to give her reasonable cause to doubt that I was at Ginny’s all night. Tom might be the cop, but my mother is the one who will interrogate me until my story falls apart.
I stuff my clothes into my overnight bag and head downstairs. A Post-it is stuck to the front doorknob. You don’t have to lock it. I’ve never seen Ginny’s handwriting before; her small print is neat and unassuming.
My mother is Windexing the hell out of the kitchen countertops when I let myself in at home, which means she drank too much last night. She only gets like this when she’s hungover—someone comes to clean our house twice a month.
This morning, she even has rubber gloves on. I plunk my dance bag onto the kitchen island to announce my presence and she spins around. Her face falls when she sees me, like maybe she was expecting someone better.
“How was the dinner?” I ask brightly.
“Painful.” She sets the Windex on the counter. “We had to sit next to Heidi Coughlin.”
“Mrs. Coughlin?” That woman is like a gnat; I cannot get away from her. “Why was she at a PBA dinner?”
“Her father was killed in the line of duty in the city years ago. She goes every year in his memory.”
I keep my eyes on the fruit bowl on the kitchen island. Select the least-bruised banana and begin unpeeling it. Mom never could stand Colleen’s mother. She and my sister would cringe every time Mrs. Coughlin’s name popped up on the caller ID at home. I think all of the cheer moms should get warm-up jackets to match the girls’! What are you bringing to the potluck, Mrs. Carlino? All the other mothers have signed up for something!
The force of my mother’s stare is so intense I can’t ignore it any longer. I look up. She’s watching me, in that frightening way where I can’t tell what I’ve done to piss her off.
“She said she asked you to help plan a memorial ceremony, but she never heard from you.”
Of course Mrs. Coughlin said something. She was always a meddling pain in the ass. “She didn’t ask me herself. Mr. Demarco did.”
Mom’s eyes flash. “I wanted to tell her that my daughter would never be so inconsiderate. Should I have?”
“I’m sorry. If you want me to, I’ll tell her on Monday that I’ll help.”
“You can do whatever you want, Monica,” she says, like she couldn’t care less. I’d almost prefer it if she’d yelled at me.
She goes back to her Windexing, and I feel like I should say I’m sorry again. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It never makes a difference anyway.
* * *
—
I’m tired enough from a crappy night’s sleep in someone else’s bed that I think I can nap, even though my body is still racing from last night. I wake up around ten to my phone ringing. The sight of Mike Mejia’s name on the screen plunges me into a panic.
Shit shit shit he knows. I consider letting it go to voice mail, but I know it’ll be worse if I do. He’ll just call Tom if I don’t answer. Maybe I can talk him into not telling him at all. I inhale. Answer.
“Hi,” I warble.
“Hey, kid. I’m sorry for running out on you last night.”
I exhale so loudly I’m sure he can hear me. “Don’t be. Is everything okay?”