Crash (Visions (Simon Pulse)) (12 page)

“7:04 p.m.,” I whisper. I stare harder, trying to make out the second hand, but it’s no use. The exact second
won’t be known, but getting it down to the minute is pretty awesome.

“Jules, you are a genius,” I whisper. “Now you just need to synchronize.”

A voice startles me back to the present. “Yo, insane freak. Talking to yourself?” It’s BFF Sarah, trying to sound tough, sitting down at the computer two seats away. She takes out a notebook.

I frown. “What do you want?”

“You messed up our V-Day Dance decorations.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be standing in the middle of a crowded hallway with them, then.” Where I’d normally be scared, I am now bold. I look at her and wait for her response.

She wavers just slightly. “You’re pissed because nobody ever invites you. That’s why you did it.”

I glance back at my screen and minimize it, then look back to her. “Invites me to what?”

“Anything. Homecoming. Winter Ball. Valentine’s Dance.”

I sigh and wonder if she’s feeling
empowered
today too. If she is, it’s not working. I lean toward her. “Did you come here to harass me?”

She doesn’t respond, probably because she’s so dumb she doesn’t have an answer. She pulls out some papers and ignores me.

I go back to studying my screenshot.

But she’s not done. A minute later, she says, “Is that what made you insane, freak? You’re in love with Sawyer Angotti, but he never asks you to anything, and now you’ve lost your marbles. It is, isn’t it.” It’s not a question.

My neck grows warm. There’s only one way she could have found out I told Sawyer I love him. Unless she’s just digging at me. That’s probably more likely. I stare at my computer screen and say nothing, heeding the inner instinct to brace myself for more.

“But you can’t help being insane, can you,” Sarah says in a pitying voice. “Your family and all.”

I close my eyes and grip my chair arms. In my mind, I decimate her. I scream, I kick, I hurt her on the outside for what she just did to my insides. I take a measured breath, and then I open my eyes and turn slowly toward her, covering my teeth with my lips and imitating that scary, gummy man from the hospital when Dad was there. In a harsh voice, I whisper, “Do you want to find out how crazy I really am?”

It was pretty awesome seeing Sarah react to
that, I have to admit. She pushed her chair back with a loud scrape and her eyes went wide, her mouth open, her wad of gum just sitting there, tempted to roll out. And then she pulled her stuff together, called me a lunatic, and took off. I wonder if she got her assignment done. Tsk.

I spend an hour studying close-ups of each scene, landing again on the one quick shot of the dining room window. There’s still something odd, but I can’t figure it out. I spend a couple bucks to print out all the screenshots, but when I go to pick them up off the printer, they’re not there. There’s just a stack of color shots of
Skinny Wallets, Fat Love
. Now I really do look insane.

“Big sigh, Demarco,” I mutter under my breath. “Maybe next time print just one and check it, hey?”

•       •       •

Once I get home, everybody’s down in the restaurant already. So I start digging for a disguise.

I sort through the hoards and piles and boxes. Because I know that somewhere in here, there’s a whole crap ton of Halloween costumes. And I definitely can’t be recognized again—at least not right now.

After an hour, and just when I’m about to give up and get my butt to work, I find the mother lode in the far corner of the dining room, under a musty box of canning jars, which we keep in case we ever decide to fix the seventeen broken pressure cookers in the living room, which we’ll do if we ever learn how to can things. It all makes sense, doesn’t it? Especially since we have all this spare time to take up hobbies.

Anyway, right on top of the pile are some retro glasses and three wigs: Elvira, Marilyn Monroe, and a generic one with brown dreadlocks, or maybe it’s Bob Marley, I’m not sure. I shake them, and only dust falls out—a good sign that even the mice are repulsed. A careful sniff of each doesn’t kill me or even knock me flat, so I confiscate them, putting them into a plastic bag and shoving them under my bed.

•       •       •

Five useful things about living with a fairly clean hoarder:

1. If you look around long enough, you’re bound to find something for a science project

2. There are endless opportunities for organizing if you have OCD

3. The potential for canning is good to great

4. It’s easy to hide things in plain sight, like gnomes and bird cages an’ shit

5. Survival rate is over one full year when zombies attack

When I walk downstairs and into the restaurant, Rowan and Trey are standing on chairs at the entryway to the dining room, both with rolls of masking tape on their wrists and strings of shiny heart cutouts around their necks.

I tie my apron around my waist and squint up at them. “Seriously? Do we really have to encourage it?”

“Sing it,” Trey mutters. He slaps a circle of tape on the back of a red heart and sticks it to the trim work.

“Oh, come on,” Rowan says. “It’s a beautiful tradition. Mom found those heart-shaped pizza pans.”

“Wasn’t too beautiful for the martyred dude,” Trey says.

“Heart-shaped pans. Like we need more crap,” I mutter as the front door jingles and Dad walks in with two
magazines and a newspaper. Trey snorts and Rowan’s eyes bug out.

“Feeling better?” Dad asks me. He doesn’t look quite so freaked out as he did the other day. I glance at Trey, who has a ribbon in his mouth. He nods once from his perch.

“Yeah, I guess it was just the flu or meningitis or black hairy tongue disease or something other than pregnancy.”

Dad blushes and pretends he doesn’t get it. “Take it easy tonight. You need to be ready for Saturday.”

“I know.” Mentally I calculate the date and day of the week—being sick always throws me off. I’ve been thinking it’s Monday all day, but it’s Thursday. No wonder everybody’s hanging pink and red stuff everywhere. When Valentine’s Day falls on the weekend, it’s always out of control.

I get into the dining room to give Aunt Mary a hand as five o’clock rolls around and the early bird diners arrive, right on cue. The decorations are all up in here already. Trey and Rowan must have started right after school. They have them draped in a lovely, nontacky way across the picture windows. Both Rowan and Trey are pretty artistic, which is why they’re hanging decorations and I’m serving. I get the drink orders for the first two tables by the windows while regretting being unable to print the pictures I wanted at the library.

When I’m setting down their drinks, a shiny, dangling heart turns on its twine and catches the light, sparkling. I fight off the twinge of longing inside. Maybe BFF Sarah is right, and I’m sad and pissed that nobody ever asks me to go to any dances. And that I’m almost seventeen and I still haven’t had my first kiss. I stare at the heart for a second and then turn away before the patrons think I’m weird.

And then, halfway to the kitchen, it hits me. I stop, stand, and pivot to look at it once more as it catches the light. “Shit,” I whisper. “Really?” I drop off my tray and run through the kitchen, past Tony and Dad, and out the back door, almost wiping out in my haste to get into the door to the apartment, and race up the stairs.

I flip on the TV and watch the scenes unfold, pause on the dining room window, and stare at it. Crawl up to the screen and stare harder. “Oh my dogs,” I say. I turn the TV off, grab the spare delivery-car key, my coat, and the Marilyn wig, and fly back downstairs, outside, to the car, and take off, not even caring if anybody’s watching me, or if anybody needs a pizza delivered. Because this can’t wait.

I pull into the parking lot of Angotti’s as dusk
turns to dark. On my head is the platinum-blond wig, and I’m trying hard not to think about there being any bugs in it. I have one directive—I need to get to approximately where I’d be standing if I had been recording the scene, about twenty or thirty feet from the building and slightly off to the side closer to the back door. I need to have that perspective. I turn the engine off and hop out, holding my wig on my head and using the car as cover.

In my vision, there are light fixtures in the window, hanging from the ceiling—I could see them through the window. I remember noticing they weren’t there the first time I came here to look at everything, but that was
because it was the night of the wedding, and I assumed the tables were all rearranged.

But they’re still not there. Nothing’s hanging in the window. People sit there eating, but the lights are either recessed or too high to be seen.

Or maybe they weren’t lights at all.

Maybe they were decorations.

“Valentine’s Day,” I murmur, and the missing piece falls into place. “Snowstorm forecasted for this weekend. Those were decorations hanging down, not lights. Jeez.” I shake my head. “This whole thing happens on Valentine’s Day?” A surge of fear pulses through me. “Could the timing be any worse?”

As I stand there in the shadows, the back door to the kitchen swings open hard, slamming against the block wall and ringing out into the quiet night. It’s Sawyer. “Let it go,” he’s saying to the bright beam of light that follows him. His voice is angry. “I’m telling you, don’t engage with that son of a bitch. You’re just enabling him.”

The blond girl I saw the other night follows Sawyer out and slams the door shut. She stands on the step lighting a cigarette while Sawyer tosses broken-down cardboard boxes into the recycling bin. “I can’t help it,” she says. “He drives me insane.”

Sawyer closes the recycling bin and joins the girl on the step. He shoves his hands in his pockets and bounces
on the balls of his feet. I shrink back into the shadow of the car. I don’t think they can see me out here, though in retrospect, I should have chosen Elvira rather than Marilyn.

“If you try to argue with him, he’ll engage. He’ll bring out his whole
tradition
and
honor
bullshit and use that as an excuse to be a bastard. And everybody else just looks the other way.”

She takes a long, angry drag on the cigarette and, as smoke trickles out the corners of her lips, says, “What do you mean, engage?”

Sawyer stops bouncing and turns to face her. I strain to hear. “I mean he’ll probably fucking hit you, Kate, okay? So just . . . don’t.”

I lean forward, as if that’ll help me hear them, but a car pulls into the parking lot and their words are muffled by the noise of the tires. It sounds like she says “You marry me, one chicken?”

And while the driver parks, Sawyer says something like “I make you table, butterface.”

“Shut up!” I hiss under my breath at the offending car. The driver turns off the engine and gets out.

The girl takes another drag. She and Sawyer just stand there and nod at the guy as he approaches the customer entrance and goes inside.

Kate blows out smoke and drops her cigarette butt to
the ground. She stomps on it and twists it out slowly. “He hit you, then.”

“You could say that.”

“A lot?”

He shrugs.

“Still?”

“No.”

“Because . . . ?”

Sawyer is quiet for a minute. “Because I gave up.”

Kate stares at him. “Gave up on what?”

He hesitates, like he’s thinking about the answer. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Come on, tell me.”

Sawyer shakes his head. “No. You done? We need to get back in there.” He takes the girl gently by the shoulders, turns her around to face the door, opens it, and ushers her in. The door closes hard behind them.

And I stand in the parking lot, dumbfounded. Somebody hit the guy I love. I want to kill whoever it is. But first I have to save my boy. On Valentine’s Day.

Fuck.

•       •       •

My phone rings, jolting me back to reality. It’s not Trey calling, like I expect. It’s Demarco’s Pizzeria. Which means it’s a parental unit on the other end.

“Crap,” I mutter. Customer guy walks back out of
Angotti’s with a takeout package as I answer. “Hey,” I say, trying to sound breathless. “I left something at the library—my purse. Really important—on the way home now.”

There is ominous silence on the other end. I squinch my eyes shut. “Hello?” I say finally.

The normally booming voice is eerily quiet. “Get back here. Now.”

“I’m coming!” I start to say, but he hangs up.

•       •       •

I was grounded before. Now it’s like I’m the haboob of groundedness. Back at the restaurant, in between tables, Trey gives me concerned looks. My mother is worried that I’m getting addicted to something—it doesn’t matter what, she just keeps saying, “Are you addicted?” every twenty minutes. My father goes upstairs as soon as he supergrounds me, apparently overwhelmed by my disobedience, and Rowan looks like she’s going to cry because her big sister never used to get into trouble and it’s apparently scary as hell for her to see me “like this.” Whatever
this
is.

And I’m floored. “All I did was leave for, like, a half hour,” I keep explaining. “I came right back. I’m not doing drugs, I’m not
addicted
to anything, I’m not pregnant, people. Jeez.” I feel like a broken record. “I’m sixteen, Mom,” I say to her. “Do I really have to tell you
everything? I think you need to let me grow up a little, and stop . . . hovering.”

“Hovering!” she says. “Hovering? As long as you live in this house, I’ll hover all I want, thank you very much. We feed you, we give you a warm place to sleep, you have a nice job in the family business, and what do you give back? You go off without telling anybody, you leave your customers, you cavort with that Angotti boy, and you don’t appreciate anything we do for you. And then you say ‘Stop hovering’?”

I sigh. “Mom, please don’t yell. The customers can hear you. I’m sorry. I appreciate you. I should have told somebody I was leaving—I get that. I get that an ordinary worker would be fired for taking off like I did. I just . . . I panicked when I realized I forgot . . . something.” I take her hand. “I’m sorry, okay?”