Burn for Burn (21 page)

It was so cold, I could barely move. I could tell my hands were bleeding by the way the skin burned despite the chill of the water. I could hear their warbled laughter above me.

“Yo, she looks like a manatee!”

“Hey, manatee! You need a net?”

“Swim! Swim for shore, manatee!”

I flailed my arms and kicked my legs, trying to get to the surface. But my clothes weighed a hundred pounds, and I barely managed to get my head above water. I was gasping for air, and I kept swallowing mouthfuls of salty water.

The dockworkers came running, and one of them tossed me a life preserver. It took two of them to pull me out. The ferry passengers leaned over the edge of the deck to watch.

As soon as I was on land, I threw up a gallon of that salty water. That was when the boys finally stopped laughing and shrank away from the spectacle. The only one who wasn’t there was Reeve.

My hands were bleeding, my clothes were soaked and stiff and speckled with gravel, and there was vomit on my shoes. It took me a minute before I realized that my white T-shirt was completely see-through, clinging to every one of my fat rolls. I started shaking, but I wasn’t cold. I was about to lose it. And then I did. I started crying, and I couldn’t stop.

One ferry worker helped me up to the galley, then left to find me a blanket. He came back with a stack of brown paper towels from one of the bathroom dispensers. I tried using them to dry off, but as soon as they got wet, they disintegrated into ropy bits of pulp.

The whole time I was sobbing.

Reeve was there, in the galley too. He sat in the first row of seats near the deck windows, the seat he’d carved his name in. He looked straight ahead, out the window at Jar Island off in the distance. He didn’t acknowledge me, or what he’d done. He didn’t even turn around once. No matter how hard I cried.

When we reached Jar Island, Reeve took off right away. I waited for the other passengers to disembark, and then I snuck off the ferry and hid behind a delivery truck that was waiting to drive aboard for the return trip. I could see my mom waiting there. As Reeve ran off the boat, she waved at him. He didn’t wave back. He pretended not to see her.

If she didn’t see me, I knew she’d stay and wait for me to come in on the next boat. I couldn’t stand her seeing me that way. I didn’t want her to know that the boy I’d told her so much about, the boy we took for ice cream that rainy day, had done this to me.

I decided to sneak home, change my clothes, and pretend to have come back by the next boat. She would never have to know what happened. Dad, too.

I crouched down and used different cars for cover. Once I was out of the parking lot, I huffed it up the hill to our house, my sneakers squishing with every step. All I could think about was how he’d acted all those times when we were alone. Like he cared about me. Like we were friends. I couldn’t imagine facing him the next morning. Both because of what he’d done to me, and because I knew I’d never get that back again. As pathetic as it was, Reeve was the only friend I had left.

I went up to my room and opened my closet with the intention to change clothes. Really. But instead of doing that I found myself staring up at the beams on my ceiling. Then I got a rope from the basement and, after a couple of tries, looped it over a beam and tied it into a noose. I dragged my desk chair over, slipped the rope over my neck. And then took a big step off the chair, and dropped.

But as soon as I fell, I realized that I didn’t want to die. I started to fight, kicking my legs to try to get the desk chair to roll back to me. But the rope was so tight, and I couldn’t breathe. My weight swung me like a pendulum, and my feet kept knocking into the wall. I was starting to black out, lose consciousness.

Luckily, my mom came home. She heard the tapping of my feet against the wall. She came in and screamed at the sight of me. She got me down, slipped the rope off my neck, and laid with me on the floor while she called 911, stroking my hair, until the paramedics arrived.

*    *    *

Kat and Lillia stare at me, horrified.

“As soon as I was stable, my parents had me transferred to a different hospital, one far away from Jar Island. I was out of school for a whole year doing therapy and stuff. I had to live on a psych floor for months, trying to convince the doctors and nurses that I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. And the truth is, I didn’t want to. The one thing that kept me going was the thought of coming back here one day and making Reeve own up to what he did.”

I let out a breath, and already I feel lighter, just a little bit lighter.

“Well, that’s that,” Kat says. “We have to kill Reeve.”

I can’t tell if she’s joking or not. I hope she’s joking. “I don’t want to kill him,” I say, to be clear. “I just want him to feel one ounce of the pain I felt.” I’m not even sure if that is possible.

“We’ll help you, Mary. We’ll make him pay for what he did.” Tears are spilling down Lillia’s cheeks, but there’s fire in her eyes.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

Kat’s legs are shaking. “I want to drive over to Reeve’s house right freaking now, and punch him in his face. But I know we can do better, hurt him worse if we wait and think this through. We’ve got to take Reeve Tabatsky down in a major way.”

Lillia wipes her eyes. “So, what do we do?”

“You know him the best of all of us,” Kat says. “What does he care the most about?”

Automatically Lillia says, “Football. He cares about football more than anything.”

“That’s it!” I cry out. “Even back at Montessori he used to talk about how he was going to be some big football star when he got to high school!”

“Done,” Kat says. “We’ll get him kicked off the team.”

“How?” I ask. Is that even possible? Reeve’s the star quarterback. There’s no team without him. Even I know that.

Lillia’s face lights up. “Drugs! Jar Island has a super-strict no-tolerance policy. Ever since that kid from Menlow High got caught smoking weed, our coaches have been watching us really carefully, making sure we don’t do anything stupid. If we could somehow plant drugs in Reeve’s locker or something, he’d be kicked off the team for sure, even if he is the quarterback.”

“But what if he says the drugs aren’t his, and the school believes him?” I say. “He could take a voluntary drug test to prove it.”

“I guess we’ll have to slip him the drugs without him knowing,” Kat says. “Acid or ecstasy or something that will make him trip out.”

It’s one thing to plant drugs in the guy’s locker; it’s another thing to actually drug him. I look over at Lillia, expecting her to protest.

But she doesn’t. Instead she nods and says, “Let’s do it at homecoming, when everyone will be watching. He’ll definitely get homecoming king. We might as well knock him and Rennie out at the same time.” Twirling her hair around her finger, she says, “He might even get expelled. Then you’d never have to worry about him again, Mary.”

“What do you think?” Kat asks me. “This is your kill.”

“Let’s do it,” I say. I pinch my hand hard, the web of skin between my thumb and ring finger, just to make sure I’m not dreaming.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

KAT

I
T’S
F
RIDAY NIGHT
. E
VERYONE AND THEIR MOM IS OFF
island for the first away game, and I’m down at the ferry dock, waiting for my brother’s drug dealer to come in on the eight o’clock. It’s so perfect, it’s almost cliché. If only someone was here to take a picture for the yearbook. Kat DeBrassio: Most Likely to Drug the QB.

My back is up against a dock post. I’m smoking a cigarette as the ferry comes in on black waves of water. Right on time.

I feel for the wad of money stuffed into my front pocket. Sixty dollars in fives and singles, enough for two hits of ecstasy. I didn’t bother asking Mary for money, because after that story she told us, it wouldn’t feel right to ask her to pay. But I did ask Lillia. We met up in the girls’ bathroom this morning. She unzipped her little pink purse and took out an even littler pink purse and unzipped that too. All she had in there was her ChapStick; a golden Chanel lip gloss called Glimmer, Rennie’s signature color; Lillia’s driver’s license; a red Jolly Rancher; and two credit cards.

I told her drug dealers don’t accept plastic.

Lillia felt bad, I could tell, and she promised to pay me back. I told her she could buy me a carton of cigarettes or maybe something for my boat, but then she started whining that her mother goes over her charges each month, so I said forget it. I got it out of what I saved from my summer job. Whatever. It’s not like sixty bucks will make or break my college fund.

When Lillia went into a stall to pee, I opened up her purse and took out Rennie’s precious lip gloss. What a wannabe. She probably spent half a night’s pay on it. Whistling to myself, I dumped it into the trash can.

Cars parked on the freight deck click on their headlights and drive off the ferry. I watch other passengers, men in suits, cleaning ladies, people in supermarket uniforms, file down the plank. It’s lit by tiny white Christmas lights.

I get pissed when I don’t see Kevin, but he’s the last one off. He’s wearing the same beat-up jean jacket he always does. I think he’s had it since he was my age. He strolls down, stops halfway to light his cigarette, and then keeps going.

I straighten up and walk toward him. He looks at my boobs first, then my face. Classic Kevin.

“Kat?” he says, squinting through the dark. “Is that you?”

“Hey,” I say, and shove my hands into my back pockets. “Pat sent me down to pick up his stuff.”

“Oh, did he now?” Kevin grits his cigarette between his teeth and gives me a dry laugh.

“Yeah,” I say breezily, trying to hide the fact that I’m lying my ass off. While Pat was in the shower, I used his phone to text Kevin for the drugs. Pat’s friends, my friends too, use Kevin. Mostly for weed. He makes the trip to the island every Friday to make deliveries to his customers. Even though Pat lets me smoke up with him sometimes, he’d freaking murder me if he found out I’d called Kevin on my own for harder stuff. “Pat’s up at the garage, working on his bike. He cheaped out and bought a rebuilt starter, and now he can’t get the thing to turn over. I told him to just return the piece of crap and get a new one, but you know how he is. Anyway, he sent me down here.” The way I say it, I make it sound complain-y. “Asshole.”

“Pat doesn’t really strike me as an ecstasy kind of guy.”

I’m not sure if Kevin’s on to me or just trying to chat me up. Either way, I have to think fast, because Kevin’s right. Pat is a stoner, through and through. “He’s finally hooking up with some girl,” I say. “Only, she’s not cute. So . . . maybe he needs help.”

Kevin laughs hard at his, so hard he coughs. Then he lifts his arms up in a deep stretch. “Well, I couldn’t get regular E from my supplier. So I got the liquid stuff instead. I’d better call that SOB and make sure he’s cool with that.”

Liquid ecstasy? I didn’t know that existed. That’ll be even easier for Lillia to slip into Reeve’s drink. “It works just the same as regular E?”

“Actually, it’s stronger.” Kevin reaches for his cell.

“Nice. I know Pat’ll be cool with that.” I quick take out the money from my pocket and hand it over to Kevin, before he has a chance to dial.

He shoots me daggers. “Not here,” Kevin barks, and looks over both of his shoulders. “Walk with me.”

So I put the money back into my pocket and follow him into town, feeling pretty stupid. We go over to the restaurant where Rennie works, Bow Tie, and head for the back door, where the kitchen is. You can hear all kinds of restaurant noise inside—dishes getting washed, pots and pans clanking around, guys shouting out orders. I’m figuring Kevin wants to do the deal here, because it’s pretty shadowy. I reach for my money again, but he waves me off and asks, “What’s your poison, Kitty Kat?”

Gross. “They aren’t going to serve me here.”

“I do business with some of the bartenders. We’ll be okay. So . . . let me guess.” He looks me up and down. “You’re a Sex on the Beach kind of girl.”

I roll my eyes. “Whiskey,” I say.

His face lights up. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Wait. Can we do the deal here? I should get back to Pat. I don’t want him to freak out.”

“Come on my rounds with me tonight, and I won’t tell your brother you’re buying E off me and trying to use him for cover.” He sighs and looks around. “This island is so damn boring. I don’t know how people live here. Come on. Keep me company. You’re my friend’s baby sister, so I ain’t gonna try nothing. Hey, I’ll even knock five bucks off what I’m charging you. Come on, Kitty Kat. What else are you doing tonight?”

I’m not doing anything, but that’s beside the point. I just want my ecstasy and to go the hell home, not keep Kevin company on his drug runs. But I’ll take one for the team. For Mary. “All right, deal.”

I wait while Kevin struts into the kitchen. He comes out a few minutes later with two drinks from the bar. A beer for him and a whiskey for me. The glass is small, but the brown liquid is poured to the very top. I doubt it’s top shelf. Probably well booze, the cheap stuff.

“I like it with ice,” I say, just to be a snot. As I take the glass, some of the whiskey drips over the edge and onto my fingers. I lick them clean.

Kevin grins out the side of his mouth. “You are a sassy little Kitty Kat, aren’t you?”

Flirting with Kevin makes me want to barf, but I know that’s what I have to do to get what I want. And whatever. I’m good at it. I hiss and pretend to swipe at his face with my claw.

I expect Kevin to sit down with his beer. Instead he starts walking away from the restaurant. He tucks his beer up the sleeve of his jean jacket. “Next stop, the Jar Island Retirement Home.” I guess I make a face, because he says, “I’ve got a bunch of glaucoma patients in there who need the weed.”

I guess that’s sort of a mitzvah or whatever. Helping sick people smoke up. Noble, almost.

“All right,” I say. I take a sip of my whiskey and pick up the pace. “We don’t want to keep the grammys and grampys waiting.”