17 & Gone(36)

Paul let her in the car, but he made her sit in back this time.

They were on the road when the drug kicked in, on a narrow lane skirting the edge of the mountain, blinded by shooting snow. The white battering the hood was the same white flitting into the sky and the same white slapping the windshield. All was white.

You can’t know how long it’ll take to trickle into your system, Tim had told them, but it’s not instantaneous, and they probably had a good half hour, so it’ll be a smooth ride in, so gentle you won’t know until— Jeannette smiled and said she felt it right now. Shit, man—she felt it.

Paul, the one driving, slowed to a crawl. He spoke over his shoulder to Natalie, who was in the backseat behind him, forgetting that she’d nicked the paint job on his car now, saying, “Whoa, you feel that?” like they shared the same body and were feeling the same things.

She told him she did. She told everyone in the car that she felt it. In fact, she felt other sensations instead.

Like how cold it was, so cold since Paul hadn’t let the car warm up before shifting it into drive, and colder still because Paul had the window cracked.

Also she felt a climbing ache in her head, probably from the overpowering scent of gasoline. Was the car’s gas tank leaking?

None of this was an effect of the drug.

She was completely sober.

What no one knew was that Natalie had pocketed the pill Tim had given her.

She didn’t know, and never would get to, what it felt like to “roll,” as Tim called it, on a white winter’s night while driving.

They didn’t know she was faking. The snow seemed funny to Jeannette, so Natalie pretended it was funny to her, too. Tim was mesmerized by the seat vinyl, how soft it was, how beautiful, so Natalie

spent

a

long

moment

contemplating its perfectly smooth skin.

Paul kept watching her instead of the road, and she wanted to tell him to keep a lookout for other cars and for patches of ice and swift turns that would veer them off the side of the mountain.

Also, she wanted to ask, haven’t they driven far enough? Wasn’t the store supposed to be just down the road?

But if she did that, she’d reveal she’d only pretended to swallow the pill. That she’d lied.

It was only that she didn’t want to lose control. She didn’t want to have no sense of what was real or unreal, to think everything was wonderful when it actually wasn’t wonderful, which was what Tim had told everyone who hadn’t done it before to expect after the chemical seeped into their bloodstreams.

Everything Tim had described was the last thing Natalie would have ever wanted, especially knowing she wasn’t among friends.

To lose control?

To not know what was real?

That would be too much like looking down at her hands and seeing they’d become her mother’s hands. Like looking into the mirror, as Natalie did every single day since the two consecutive life sentences were decided, and gazing into the eyes of a woman who could plunge a knife into a man’s stomach forty-seven times and then bag him up with his gym socks and his tennis racket and leave him at his wife’s door to be discovered when she went out to get the newspaper Sunday morning.

Natalie didn’t, couldn’t be sure, what she was capable of, having this woman for a mother, and so she could never let go the way the others could. She’d never get so inebriated she’d climb atop the bar in a basement rec room and pitch herself face-first into the arms of whoever would catch her, like Lila had before the orange-juice run.

And yet somehow, sober, Natalie had gotten herself talked into going for a ride in Paul’s Mustang. And she was sober when Jeannette turned to her in the backseat of the moving car and said, as if she’d only just noticed her, “Natalie Montesano? Natalie, is that you?”

Jeannette’s pupils had grown to two black nickels, gargantuan against the shrinking sea of her irises. She wasn’t slurring; she was talking as if she didn’t know how to make full use of her mouth.

“Wait.” She seemed confused. “Wait.

Why don’t we like you?”

And that was all it took. The fine feeling, the open mind, the sense of adventure in agreeing to go on the drive in the snowy night, it all left Natalie.

And good riddance. In its place came disdain. Pulsed through with rage.

Woven with hate.

Maybe there was a piece of her mother inside her after all. It wouldn’t cause her to grab a sharpened object and plunge it into the closest chest—three hearts to choose from in this car. It had always been subtler, inside Natalie. It made her not care. Not about herself, and not about anyone else.

She didn’t care if they all died on this road tonight.

When she did it, it was without thinking, and it was also as if she’d been premeditating it for years: She reached her arm forward into the front seat and she said, “Watch out for that car!”

There was no other car. There was only the car they were in, which shuddered when the brakes were jammed, and then slid. Soon the old Mustang was careening across the ice, not going straight and not going sideways, and there was the railing at the road’s edge, and there was the space ahead of it, filled only with air and emptied of trees.

There was this moment before the car made impact, so of course she remembered

it,

where