Beware That Girl (23 page)

Atta go, Mark Redkin.

Shoot me now.

Worse yet, I was probably going to have to write it.

We toasted each other with a Valentine’s Day coffee first thing in the morning. “At least we have each other,” she said.

Liar.

About half an hour before I had to leave for the market, Olivia decided to take a bath. She’d gone from being a multi-shower-a-day girl to a big bath girl, at least on the days she saw
him.
Always when she saw him.

I’d tense up as soon as I heard the water running. She was slipping down some weird rabbit hole, and if I couldn’t figure out something soon, she’d take me down with her, I just knew it. But what? I couldn’t risk another blowup about Mark. I’d be on the street.

Bruce and I were in the living room chasing anxiety bubbles while Olivia bathed. I was the one who needed the Ativan now. Wait. I knew about the meds bottles in the bathroom, but surely she kept a stash on her as well. The backpack! I’d been looking for a chance to go through it anyway.

I tiptoed into her room. The backpack was on the floor by her bed. I reached into one of the side pockets: lip glosses, tampons, keys. Damn. Other side pocket: ID and credit cards. The girl had a million of them. Why didn’t she keep them in her wallet like normal people? Next, the center pocket. The water stopped. I heard her sigh and I stopped breathing. Bruce came in to give me a helpful lick in the ear. I couldn’t risk shooing him away—she’d hear. There, two bottles. I opened the Ativan, popped a pill and returned the bottle before carefully picking up the other one. This one I hadn’t seen before. Olivia didn’t have its twin in her medicine chest.

Bingo.

This was the serious stuff—something called risperidone, 2 mg. What was that? What was it for? I replaced the bottle and zipped up the bag, and then Bruce and I crawled back to her bedroom door.

I was going to be late for my shift.

“Olivia,” I called, “I have to go now.”

“Okay.” I heard splashing. “Don’t work too hard. See you tonight.”

Sure.

—

I smiled at everyone in the store. I smiled at the vegetables, at the pineapples and at Mrs. Chen nonstop. My face hurt from smiling. It didn’t hit me until halfway through my shift that I was stoned out of my gourd. Mellow doesn’t begin to touch how I was feeling. Wow, how high a dose was she on? I’d taken the odd scrip before from other girls at other schools—bennies, Adderall, ecstasy—just to be social. But this was a trip all on its own.
Groovy.

Mrs. Chen eyed me nervously. Or I might have imagined it.

When Johnny came to get me for coffee, I giggled the whole way over to his family’s bakery.

“Nice to see you so chill, Michelob.”

“I like that name.” Was I grinning at him?

“I thought you hated it. I just call you that to get a rise out of you.”

He was a handsome guy, that Johnny. He would look yummy in a cop uniform. I was supposed to ask him something. I had planned to ask him something, something important. Instead, I giggled again.

“Naw, I’ve never had a nickname before.”

Cockroach.

“Least not one that wasn’t ugly.” And then I giggled again. I am so
not
a giggler.

We made our way to our table at the bakery, and Johnny nodded to his uncle as he always did. Dominic brought us both espressos, but instead of our usual pastry, he brought me a massive almond cookie in the shape of a heart with “Will You Be Mine?” scrawled in red icing. All I registered was that it was pretty and that I was starved. What
was
I going to ask him?

I realized that both Dominic and Johnny were looking at me intently.

“Oh! The cookie.” I started breaking it up into bite-sized chunks and shoving them in my mouth, so hungry. “Great cookie.”

Johnny winked at Dominic before he left. “I just thought it’d be a kick if…but hey, you know, dig in and everything.”

Digging, that’s it!

“Johnny, you’d have to dig into a person’s background before they’d be allowed into a school system, right? Have you come to that part in any of your classes?”

“How’s the cookie, Kate?” The boy was looking aggrieved.

I took a huge bite. “Dlishus,” I offered with my mouth still full. “They’d need some kind of a check to have, like, a senior position, right?”

“Can we remember that I’m not an actual cop? But yeah, I do know that schools would require a standard police background check.”

“Excellent!” I took another bite. “This really is good, best cookie ever. And the results would be in the school admin file or something, huh?”

He frowned as if he was having trouble following me.

“You’d better get some before I eat it all.” I kept breaking off cookie bits and shoving them into my mouth. “So records…they’d be in a file someplace, right?”

“Not necessarily. If they’re in the school, it pretty much guarantees that they’ve got a clean record in New York. Maybe a DUI might turn up, but they’d be clear, you know. What’s this about? You worried about someone at Waverly? That’d be rich.”

“Just New York?” Okay, that was disappointing. I finished off the cookie and was pressing my finger against the crumbs. Mark, I seemed to remember, had bopped around all over the place. “Not the whole world?”

He laughed then.

“No, Kate. There is no global criminal record database, unless we’re talking Homeland Security. Don’t they feed you uptown?”

“Homeland Security, huh? And you couldn’t get into that?” I was still pretty spacey but also still starving. “Can we get another big cookie?”

“Well, surprisingly, Homeland Security doesn’t let first-year criminology students muck around their top-secret database, and yes, you can have another big cookie.” He motioned to Dominic.

“So how would a person find out about someone’s, uh, potential naughtiness in other places, then?”

The cookie arrived and I dived in, even though it didn’t have the pretty red icing on it.

“What the hell, Kate? What have you got yourself into?”

“Nofing!” I might have sprayed him with a couple of crumbs.

“You do it the old-fashioned way,” he sighed. “You track the name and the last-known address, and you Google the local papers over the correct time period. Laborious but effective.” Johnny leaned back into his chair. Wow, his bakery T-shirt fit ever so nicely across his torso. He crossed his arms. Such nice arms. All guys should know that all girls like arms.
Keep your eye on the prize. You have no room for this, Katie O’Brien.

“You’re so cute.” What the hell? Was that
me
? It must have been because he was shaking his head and grinning.

“You’re a trip, you know?”

More like I was
on
a trip.

He glanced at his watch. “Time to go back. Let’s go. I’ll get you one more for the road.” Johnny got up and went over to the counter.

Okay, okay, okay.
Our advancement director’s past “accomplishments” were strewn all over school, and his resume had to be in Draper’s clunker of a computer. I’d start there and work my way back—when I had a chunk of alone time and my head was on straight.

Johnny proffered another outsized almond cookie wrapped in a sheet of waxed paper. I bit into it as soon as we got outside. He was still looking a bit put off.

“Brilliant cookies, Johnny. I mean it. I’ve never had better. Really!”

He groaned as he steered me back to the Chens’.

There’s just no pleasing some people.

It was Presidents’ Day, no school. But no Mark either. Kate was doing a holiday shift at the market, so it would have been perfect. But Mark was otherwise engaged. All day.

He was a busy man. Of course he was. Olivia understood this. She also knew not to whine or pout. That was for the others. And she was pretty sure that there still were
others.

For now.

It’s just that today was special—actually, not special but hard. It was a hard anniversary. A year ago today, Olivia left for Houston. It had been bad for weeks, months beforehand, but today was the day they’d left. A bullet of shame pierced through the meds.

She looked at her watch. When would Kate get home from that stupid job? She needed Kate. Her place was here beside her, especially today. Olivia popped another Ativan.

She could call her father.

She worked out the time in her head. Her father was in Singapore for three days. No, he’d be asleep now. She knew he’d call as soon as he was awake. He would call for sure. Because today was today, and he knew it.

What if Kate didn’t come right home? What if she decided to go somewhere with that Johnny or one of the Wonders? What if she’d driven Kate away? It was possible. Olivia winced, remembering what she’d accused Kate of when they argued. That, and she had been a bit of a bitch of late. Was Kate distancing herself? The possibility alarmed her.

She had to get Kate back on board, make her understand. Not about Mark—and certainly not about everything, of course. Kate wasn’t ready for that. But about today and why it was so important. Yeah. And then Kate would completely forgive her for everything and go back to being all understanding and caring and…devoted.

Anka was tracking her. Anka knew about today. Even though she had the day off, she had not gone to her sister’s place. Anka wasn’t going anywhere.

The housekeeper stole into the living room brandishing a feather duster.

“Anka, you’re hovering.”

“Vat hoovering? I don’t know vat dis is meaning.”

“Yeah, you do, and you’re doing it.” She walked over to her. “Kate will be home in a few minutes. Go then.”

“But—”

“I’m going to tell her about today.”

Instead of looking relieved, Anka looked skeptical.

“She’s my best friend and I trust her completely.” And it was true. That she’d only realized it at that moment didn’t make it any less true. Kate would understand and be sympathetic, the way Mark was. Best friends shared secrets. Besides, secrets were what tied people to each other, forever. Secrets were good that way. She looked at her watch again.

Bruce began barking and running in circles. He had become an early warning system, since he heard the ping of the elevator long before anyone ever reached the doorway.

“Hey, Brucie! Hi, Olivia. Should we take him out?”

“Sure, in a minute. But sit down for a bit. I want to talk to you.”

Alarm streaked across Kate’s face. “Uh, okay.”

Anka bustled by them. “I vill coming to home eight o’clock.” She turned to Kate. “Zer is a chickens pie in za oven.”

As soon as the door shut, Olivia patted a spot beside her on the sunken sofa.

“What’s up?”

“I want to tell you about today.”

“Today?” Kate plopped onto the couch.

“Yeah, today is sort of an anniversary for me.” Olivia tucked her legs under herself and faced her friend. “You see, a year ago today, we left for Houston.”

“For the hospital?”

“Well, eventually, yes.”

“I’m so sorry, Olivia. I shouldn’t have gone to work. You shouldn’t have been alone. What a downer. I shouldn’t have…”

That was better. “S’okay. You didn’t know.” Yes, she loved Kate. She had never loved a friend before. Oh, she had faked it, professed it, pretended it, like she did with everything. But she had never truly
needed
a friend the way she needed Kate. Need, love—it was much the same thing. Olivia turned and glanced back out the windows. Dusk was settling on her city and she was safe here in her home, with her friend. Even though she couldn’t see Mark today—even though he knew what today was—well, it didn’t matter.

Olivia had Kate.

“Daddy rented a charming little house right near the hospital, and that’s where we lived until…the hospital. Daddy didn’t do a single international deal the whole time. He’d just fly into New York for the day or at most two days.” Olivia seemed to lose herself in that quaint house with its normal furniture. It was how regular people lived. She nodded at no one. “Just the two of us. And Anka, of course.”

“And…?” Kate whispered.

“And what you don’t know is that we had to leave a year ago today because, well, I felt I was starting to show.”

“To show?”

“Yes.” She spoke so softly that Kate had to lean over to hear. “You see, it wasn’t so much that I had issues—that’s more or less acceptable in our circle,
n’est-ce pas
? I swear you’re the only person I know who isn’t medicated.”

Kate nodded, but she was clearly confused.

“Remember I told you about the public school boy?”

Kate nodded again.

“Well, we had to leave because I was pregnant.” Olivia swallowed and turned back to the windows. “And I wouldn’t consider an abortion. Don’t ask me why—I can’t tell you to this day. I don’t know, I just don’t, but I couldn’t. I refused. So…”

“Houston.”

Kate had not moved, did not blink. No interjections or audible gasps of shock or surprise.

“So now you know. I feel better, even though it’s excruciating for me to talk about it, to revisit the details, the…shame.”

“But what happened to the…?”

Olivia’s hands trembled. “Please, let’s not…I just can’t. Not yet. But I needed you to know. I need you to, uh, try to understand me or, I don’t know, forgive me…Kate, say that you do. Please, please.”