Crash (Visions (Simon Pulse)) (7 page)

He pulls out his phone. “Son of a bitch,” he mutters.

“What are you doing?” I ask, grabbing his arm. “No. Listen to me.”

He pauses. “Then, what? Are you delivering a warning from him, or a threat?”

“Oh my God,” I say. “This is not happening. It’s neither one, Sawyer. I’m saying everything all wrong.”

“What is this, then? What’s going on? Is he suing us? He doesn’t stand a chance, you know.”

“Sawyer,” I say, and nothing is making sense. “Stop. Just hold on a second. This has nothing to do with my family! I—I have this vision . . . thing . . .” I trail off. It sounds absolutely ridiculous saying it out loud.

“What?” He looks at me like I’ve lost my marbles.

But now I’m committed. “I keep seeing a vision,” I say,
trying to sound authoritative and not insane. “Over and over. You have to believe me, Sawyer, just listen. Please.”

He stops fingering his phone, gently pulls his arm away from my grasp, and takes a step away from me. “A vision,” he says sarcastically.

My heart sinks. I look away. In the window of the apartment across the street, I watch the scene and explain it as it happens. “Yes,” I say in a quiet voice. “It’s snowing pretty hard. A snowplow comes careening over the curb into your back parking lot. It hits the restaurant. There’s a huge explosion.” I turn back to him. “People die.” I close my lips.
You, you, you, Sawyer. You die.

He doesn’t react, waiting for more.

“Obviously I’m aware that I sound crazy,” I say evenly, realizing my life is now over. “I can’t explain why it’s happening. I don’t ever have visions otherwise, and I don’t think I’m insane. I just keep seeing this—on billboards and TVs and stop signs and . . .” I trail off and face him once more, trying to keep my stupid quivering lip from betraying me. “I just felt like I had to tell you, because if I didn’t, and something happened to you . . . your restaurant, I mean, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”
And by the way, I love you.

He stands there a long moment, his eyes narrowed, snow falling and sticking to his hair and lashes. He blinks the flakes away.

“Look,” I say, and I make my voice sound clinical now to keep myself from losing it. “I never expected you to believe me. I just had to say something. For me.” And suddenly I know it’s over, and I’ve done my job, and that’s all I have. I nod once very quickly and add, “That’s it,” as if to signal an end to the insanity, and then turn away and walk to my car.

He doesn’t stop me.

I get in and start it up, letting the windshield wipers take care of the snow and the defroster clear up the steamy glass caused by cooling pizza. All the while I pray for my door to magically open, for him to come after me. But I’m so afraid to look. Finally, when I start to appear either desperate or suspicious from sitting there so long, I pull out of the parking spot and dare to look back. He’s still standing outside, watching me go. Gathered at the storefront window now, and peering out at me, are Sawyer’s mother and two men. Next to her is a man I recognize as Sawyer’s father, and next to him is an elderly mustachioed man. And as all the thoughts of what I’ve just done numb my brain, I realize that the old gentleman standing there must be the infamous Mr. Fortuno Angotti—the man whose caricatured face adorns the Angotti’s sauce label. The man who stole our family’s recipe and drove my grandfather to his grave.

Rowan meets me at the door. “Dad’s freaking
out,” she says.

“Tough.”

“What’s that?” Rowan points at my bag.

“I messed up.”

“Is that your last order?”

“Yep, sure is.”

Rowan grabs it and pulls the box out. “It’s . . . moist.”

“Yup.” I shrug. I feel like crying. I’ve totally messed up two orders in one night. Not cool. Not to mention that other thing.

“The kitchen is already shut down, Jules. What do you plan to do? Where have you been all this time?”

“Lost in the blizzard. Couldn’t find it.” I can’t look at
her. I move past her and go to the sink to wash my hands and splash some water on my face.

“Dad’s gonna shit a brick.”

I push my fingers into my eyes, trying to stop the guilty tears from coming. But everything is so stupid. Why did I say anything? By tomorrow, everybody at school will know I’m a mental case. Sawyer must think I’m a freak.

“Are you okay?” Rowan asks, looking at me hard. Her voice softens. “Oh my gosh, are you crying? Seriously, you don’t have to cry about it.”

I grab blindly for a paper towel, determined not to make a single cry noise. I blow the sob out through my lips, nice and slow, and breathe in.

“Although,” Rowan says, musing to herself, “I would probably cry if it were me. I hate not finishing the job, you know? Makes me feel like a total failure.”

I take another deep breath and pull the towel away from my face. “You’re not helping.”

Trey bursts in the door with his empty bag, whistling. “Major tips, girlie,” he says to Rowan, flapping his wad of money in her face.

“You have to share, you know.”

“Not on Super Bowl Sunday,” he says, teasing her. He notices the pizza box sitting there and looks at me. “What happened?”

“She got lost,” Rowan says. “Jules, did you call the people? You had their number.”

I don’t want to lie anymore. “No. I just messed up, okay? Can you call them?”

Trey gives me a weird look but says nothing.

Rowan sighs deeply and grabs the phone, then looks at the ticket on the box and starts punching buttons. “Fine,” she mutters. “It’s, like, eleven p.m., my gosh, and—Oh, hi! This is Rowan from Demarco’s Pizzeria. We are sooo sorry—”

I flee through the kitchen to the dining room. May as well face the wrath and get it over with.

Mom is rolling napkins.

“Where’s Dad?” I ask.

“Upstairs. Very upset.” She looks at me like she’s waiting for something.

“Sorry about dropping that pizza earlier and messing everything up. I, ah . . .”

“You’re fine,” she says, waving it off. “But why don’t you tell me what else you did?”

I stare at her. “What do you mean?”

“You know.”

I hate when she does this. It’s like she’s trying to trick me into confessing things, which really pisses me off because I’m a good kid. I sigh. She couldn’t possibly know about this most recent pizza fiasco yet, could she?
She’s freaking jiggy with her ESP. “Mother, please. I’m tired.”

She presses her lips together, and then says, “Your father got a call about ten minutes ago from Mario Angotti.”

The implications are so heavy, so unexpected, I can’t even speak. I sit down hard in a chair and put my face in my hands. “Who?”

She glares. “Mario Angotti. Son of Fortuno Angotti. Father of Sawyer Angotti, whose acquaintance I believe you’ve made.”

“Oh, no,” I whisper. “Oh, mother-fuh-lovin’ crap.” I can’t believe they called. I didn’t do anything. “No-o,” I moan as it all sinks in. I can’t look at my mother. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Anthony, keep your riffraff out of my restaurant or I’ll slap a restraining order on your whole family.’ Or something like that.”

“Wait. He said ‘riffraff’?”

“It might have been another word.”

“Oh.” I rub my sore elbow and shake my head, staring at the ancient carpet. “How’s Dad handling it?”

Mom gives me a rueful smile and reaches for another stack of napkins. “I think you can probably guess.”

I stand up and start pacing around the tables. “Crap,” I mutter. “What now?”

“Why on earth did you go there, Julia?”

I stop pacing and look at her. “I had to tell Sawyer something. He’s the one who knocked my pizza over earlier . . .” I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. All I know is that I should probably stop talking.

“He knocked your pizza over? On purpose?”

“No! Nothing like that. It was an accident.”

“What kind of hooligan would do that? We should be the ones slapping a restraining order on
him
,” she says.

Oh, hey, there’s a way to ruin my life even more. “Please, please don’t do that.”

“We just might.”

“Well, that’s great.” I get up and grab my gloves. “I’m going to bed.”

I stomp into the kitchen just as Trey pulls a pizza out of the oven. “Is that the one I messed up on? They still want it, this late?”

“Yep,” he says. He cuts it, grabs a box and slides it in, then maneuvers it into the bag.

I’m so frustrated I want to punch the wall. “Okay, awesome,” I say. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” I reach for the bag.

“I got it,” he says. “Go upstairs.”

I bite my lip. He makes me want to cry. I know I should object, but I don’t. “You won’t believe what I did,” I say.

“Probably not.” He smiles and grabs his coat and keys,
then the pizza, and he’s out the door. “Wait up, we’ll talk. It’ll be fine,” he calls as it closes.

“Thanks, Trey. I will,” I say, but he’s gone. All I can hear now is Dad slinging crap around upstairs. I head out of the restaurant as Trey’s taillights disappear, and start making my way upstairs to deal with Dad.

When I enter the apartment, Dad is fuming. At
first, he just looks at me and shakes his head—it’s the Demarco way of exuding disappointment without a word, and it works. The irony here is that he’s standing in the middle of the dining room, next to where I think there might be a table and some chairs somewhere, but they’ve been loaded with piles and piles of his junk for the past nine years. Yet nobody ever calls him on that.

His silence is thick. Finally I speak up. “I’m sorry I went to Angotti’s. I just had to tell—”

“No!” His voice thunders, and he starts in. “You do not ‘just have to’ anything with the Angottis. Ever. Do you hear me? Do you want to ruin our business? You want the newspaper to find out that the Angottis have
put a restraining order on the Demarcos? What does that say to the community?”

“They haven’t done that—”

He starts pointing at me. “Not yet. Not yet. Better be never. You stay away from that boy. Do I need to find a new school for you? Is that it?”

My jaw drops. As much as I dislike my school, at least I have Trey and Rowan there. At least I can look at Sawyer once a day. “Dad, seriously! Are you really trying to ruin my life?”

He gives me a suspicious look. “What are you doing with him?”

“Nothing! I swear.”

“Then why do you have to tell him something?”

I take a breath and go with the first thing I can come up with. “School project. We’re on a team. The teacher assigned us.”

He narrows his eyes, but I can tell he wants to believe me. “What class?”

“Psych,” I say. It’s almost not a lie.

“You stay away from that place,” he says once more.

“I will, Dad. I’m sorry.”

•       •       •

When I wake up Monday morning after a terrible night’s sleep, I fight off all the thoughts about what could still happen to Sawyer. I can’t deal with that right now.

All I can think about is that I did what I had to do. I warned him. And just because everything’s all turmoily, and my dad’s a messed-up freak, and the boy I L.O.V.E. probably thinks I belong in an asylum, doesn’t change the fact that I have now satisfied whatever weird business has been going on in my head, and I am now free. I yank open the curtains and look out at the windows across the street. None of them show me an explosion. I cross my fingers and hope it’s over.

I also hope Sawyer won’t tell the whole world what I said to him. But the chances of this? Zero.

And Dad’s just going to have to get over it.

•       •       •

Five insanely overdramatic things I heard Dad muttering to himself last night as he paced the hallway outside my room:

1. “You have betrayed the name of Demarco!” (Yo, Shakespeare, live in the now)

2. “Why couldn’t you just deliver the pizza to my dear friends?” (So you and Mrs. Rodriguez are hanging out now?)

3. “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve fired the first shot!” (WTF?)

4. “No more deliveries for you. We’ll hire a boy.” (Oh,
o
-kay)

5. “Why do you want to break my heart?” (big sigh)

And now I’m grounded for two weeks, which is no big deal because I don’t go anywhere anyway. The worse punishment is that I’ve got to go to school and face the impending ridicule.

I brush my teeth and touch some pink gloss to my lips as Trey hangs on the other side of the bathroom door, waiting to get in, and I realize I’m the one who should be furious. After all, I bet Sawyer could have stopped his dad from calling my dad.

“He must think I’m a total nutball,” I murmur as I swipe a little raisin-colored eyeliner under my lower lashes.

“I totally do,” Trey says through the crack in the door. “Can you move it along? My hair needs clay before it dries like this. I practically have a ’fro.”

I open the door and he stumbles in over a new pile of magazines that surfaced since last night.

“You okay?” he asks. He got home during the muttering portion of my fight with Dad, and I’d filled him in on the rest, except of course for the real reason why I had to go see Sawyer. And I get the feeling Trey thinks there’s something relational going on between Sawyer and me . . . which I’m happy to go along with.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say in a low voice. “It’s just so stupid.” And the bigger part of me that can’t deal with the truth is crying out the thing I’m not quite ready to
acknowledge. That even though I warned Sawyer, he could still die if he doesn’t do anything about what I told him.

Trey sculpts his hair expertly and whispers, “What’s a girl in love supposed to do? In the movies, she has to defy Daddy someday. Yesterday was your day. The first of many, I suppose.” He sighs. “And we’re all in for more yelling. Great.”

“No, I’m done with it. No more yelling.”

He washes his hands and looks at me in the mirror. “Yeah, right.”

“Really,” I say, putting my things in the drawer as Rowan bursts in and squeezes between us. “It’s not worth this. I’ll . . . just forget about him.”

“Forget about who?” she asks. She slept through the fight last night.