Crescendo (23 page)

My heart was beating wildly. Walk away? Stop playing by the rules? “What are you talking about?”

I’d live on the move, constantly hiding, hoping the archangels don’t find me.

“If they did?”

I’d go to trial. I’d be found guilty, but it would give us a few weeks alone, while they deliberated.

I could feel the stricken look on my face. “And then?”

They’d send me to hell.
He paused, then added with quiet conviction,
I’m not afraid of hell. I deserve what’s coming. I’ve lied, cheated, deceived. I’ve hurt innocent people. I’ve made more mistakes than I can remember. One way or another, I’ve been paying for them most of my existence. Hell won’t be any different.
His mouth quirked into a brief, wry
smile.
But I’m sure the archangels have a few cards up their sleeves.
His smile faded, and he looked at me with stripped honesty.
Being with you never felt wrong. It’s the one thing I did right. You’re the one thing I did right. I don’t care about the archangels. Tell me what you want me to do. Say the word. I’ll do whatever you want. We can leave right now.

It took a moment for his words to settle in. I looked to the Jeep. The wall of ice between us fell away. The wall was only there because of the archangels. Without them, everything Patch and I had been fighting over meant nothing.
They
were the problem. I wanted to leave them, and everything else, behind and race off with Patch. I wanted to be reckless; thinking only of right here, right now. We could make each other forget about consequences. We’d laugh at rules, boundaries, and most of all, tomorrow. There would only be me and Patch, and nothing else would matter.

Nothing but the promise of what would happen when those weeks drew to a close.

I had two choices, but the answer was clear. The only way I could keep Patch was by letting him go. By having nothing to do with him.

I didn’t realize I was crying until Patch ran his thumbs under my eyes. “Shh,” he murmured. “It’s going to be okay. I want you. I can’t keep doing what I’m doing now, living halfway.”

“But they’ll send you to hell,” I stammered, unable to control the quiver in my lower lip.

“I’ve had a long time to come to terms with it.”

I was determined not to show Patch how hard this was for me, but I choked on the tears running down my throat. My eyes were damp and swollen, and my chest ached. This was all my fault. If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t be a guardian angel. If it weren’t for me, the archangels wouldn’t be bent on destroying him.
I
was responsible for driving him to this point.

“I need one favor,” I finally said in a small voice that sounded more like a stranger’s than my own. “Tell Vee I walked home. I need to be alone.”

“Angel?” Patch reached for my hand, but I pulled free. I felt my feet walking away, one step in front of the other. Farther and farther from Patch they took me, as if my mind had gone numb and turned all action over to my body.

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON VEE DROPPED ME OFF
near the front door to Enzo’s. I was dressed in a yellow printed sundress that walked the line between flirty and professional and was far more optimistic than anything I felt on the inside. I stopped in front of the windows to shake out my hair, which had relaxed into waves after being slept on all night, but the gesture felt wooden. I forced a smile. It was the one I’d been practicing all morning. It felt tight at the edges and brittle everywhere
in between. In the window, it looked false and hollow. But for a morning following a night spent crying, it was the best I could manage.

After walking home from Marcie’s last night, I’d curled into bed, but I hadn’t slept. I’d spent the night tormented by self-destructive thoughts. The longer I stayed awake, the more my thoughts took a dizzying departure from reality. I wanted to make a statement, and I was hurting enough not to care how drastic it was. A thought came to me, the kind of thought I never would have entertained in my life before. If I ended my life, the archangels would see it. I wanted them to feel remorse. I wanted them to doubt their archaic laws. I wanted them to be held accountable for ripping my life apart, then ripping it away completely.

My mind swirled and tottered with these kinds of thoughts all night. My emotions shifted through heartbreaking loss, denial, anger. At one point, I regretted not running away with Patch. Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing I could never have him.

But as the sun began to crack across the sky this morning, I came to a decision. I
had
to move on. It was either that, or slip into a frozen depression. I forced myself through the motions of showering and dressing, and went to school with fixed determination that no one would see below skin-deep. A pins-and-needles sensation enveloped my body, but I refused to display a single outward sign
of self-pity. I wasn’t going to let the archangels win. I was going to pull myself back on my feet, get a job, pay off my speeding ticket, finish summer school with the top grade, and keep myself so occupied that only at night, when I was alone with my thoughts and it couldn’t be helped, would I think of Patch.

Inside Enzo’s, two semicircular balconies spread out to my left and right, with a set of wide stairs leading down into the main eating area and front counter. The balconies reminded me of curved catwalks overlooking a pit. The tables on the balcony were filled, but only a few stragglers drinking coffee and reading the morning paper remained in the pit.

With the help of a deep breath, I took the stairs down and approached the front counter.

“Excuse me, I heard you’re hiring baristas,” I told the woman at the register. My voice sounded flat in my ears, but I didn’t have the energy to try to correct it. The woman, a middle-aged redhead with a name tag that read ROBERTA, looked up. “I’d like to fill out an application.” I managed a half smile, but somehow, I feared it wasn’t anywhere close to believable.

Roberta wiped her freckled hands on a rag and came around the counter. “Baristas? Not anymore.”

I stared at her, holding my breath, feeling all hope deflate inside me. My plan was everything. I hadn’t considered what I would do if even one step of it was yanked out from under me. I
needed
a plan. I needed this job. I needed a carefully controlled life where every
minute was planned, and every emotion compartmentalized.

“But I’m still looking for a reliable counter attendant, night shift only, six to ten,” Roberta added.

I blinked, my lip quivering slightly in surprise. “Oh,” I said. “That’s … good.”

“At night we dim the lights, bring out the baristas, play a little jazz, and try for a more sophisticated feel. It used to be dead in here after five, but we’re hoping to lure crowds. Tough economy,” she explained. “You’d be in charge of greeting customers and writing down orders, then calling them in to the kitchen. When the food’s ready, you’d carry it out to the tables.”

I tried to nod eagerly, determined to show her how much I wanted this job, feeling all the tiny cracks in my lips split as I smiled. “That—sounds perfect,” I managed in a husky voice.

“Do you have any work experience?”

I didn’t. But Vee and I came to Enzo’s at least three times a week. “I know the menu by heart,” I said, beginning to feel more solid, more real. A job. Everything depended on it. I was going to build a new life.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Roberta said. “When can you start?”

“Tonight?” I could hardly believe she was offering me the job. Here I was, unable to summon up even a sincere smile, but she was overlooking it. She was giving me a chance. I put my hand forward to shake hers, then noticed a half beat too late that it was trembling.

She ignored my outstretched hand, eying me with her head
cocked to one side in a way that only made me feel more exposed and self-conscious. “Is everything okay?”

I sucked in a silent breath and held it. “Yes—I’m fine.”

She gave a brisk nod. “Get here at a quarter to six and I’ll issue you a uniform before your shift.”

“Thank you so much—,” I began, my voice still in shock, but she was already scooting back behind the counter.

As I stepped outside to a blinding sun, I ran calculations in my head. Assuming I was going to make minimum wage, if I worked every night for the next two weeks, I just might be able to pay off my speeding ticket. And if I worked every night for two months, that was sixty nights that I’d be too drowned in work to dwell on Patch. Sixty nights closer to the end of summer vacation, when I could once again throw all my energy into school. I’d already decided to pack my schedule with demanding classes. I could handle homework in every shape and form, but heartbreak was entirely different.

“Well?” Vee asked, coasting up beside me in the Neon. “How’d it go?”

I climbed into the passenger seat. “I got the job.”

“Nice. You seemed really nervous going in, almost like you were going to lose it, but no reason to worry now. You’re officially a hard-working member of society. Proud of you, babe. When do you start?”

I checked the readout on the dash. “Four hours.”

“I’ll stop by tonight and request to be seated in your area.”

“Better leave a tip,” I said, my attempt at humor nearly bringing me to tears.

“I’m your chauffeur. That’s better than a tip.”

Six and a half hours later, Enzo’s was jammed to the walls. My work uniform consisted of a white pintuck shirt, gray tweed slacks with a matching vest, and a newsboy cap. The newsboy cap wasn’t doing a very good job of holding up my hair, which refused to stay tucked out of sight. At this moment, I could feel stray curls plastered to the sides of my face with sweat. Despite the fact that I was completely overwhelmed, it felt strangely relieving to be in over my head. There was no time to shift my thoughts, even fleetingly, to Patch.

“New girl!” One of the cooks—Fernando—was shouting at me. He stood behind a short wall that separated the ovens from the rest of the kitchen, flapping a spatula. “Your order is up!”

I grabbed the three sandwich plates, carefully stacked them up my arm in a row, and backed out of the swinging doors. On my way across the pit, I caught the eye of one of the hostesses. She jerked her chin at a newly seated table up on the balcony. I answered with a quick nod.
Be there in a minute.

“One prime rib sandwich, one salami, and one roasted turkey,” I said, setting the plates down in front of a party of three businessmen in suits. “Enjoy your meal.”

I jogged up the steps leading out of the pit, pulling my meal
order pad out of my back pocket. Halfway down the catwalk, my stride caught. Marcie Millar was directly ahead, seated at my newest table. I also recognized Addyson Hales, Oakley Williams, and Ethan Tyler, all from school. I thought about making an about-face and telling the hostess to give someone else—anyone else—my table, when Marcie glanced up and I knew I was trapped.

A granite-hard smile touched her mouth.

My breathing faltered. Was there any possible way she could know I’d taken her diary? It wasn’t until I’d walked home and crawled into bed last night that I remembered I still had it. I would have returned it right then, but it had been the last thing on my mind. The diary had seemed insignificant next to the raw turmoil scraping me both inside and out. As of this moment, it was sitting untouched on my bedroom floor, right beside last night’s discarded clothes.

“Isn’t your outfit the cutest thing ever?” Marcie said over the prerecorded jazz. “Ethan, didn’t you wear a vest just like that to prom last year? I think Nora raided your closet.”

While they laughed, I held my pen poised on the order pad. “Can I get you something to drink? The special tonight is our coconut lime smoothie.” Could everyone hear the scratch of guilt in my voice? I swallowed, hoping that when I spoke again, the jittery quality would be gone.

“Last time I was in here, it was my mom’s birthday,” Marcie said. “Our waitress sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her.”

It took me a whole three seconds to catch on. “Oh. No. I mean—
no
. I’m not a waitress. I’m a counter attendant.”

“I don’t care what you are. I want you to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.”

I stood paralyzed, my mind frantically groping for an escape. I couldn’t believe Marcie was asking me to humiliate myself this way. Wait.
Of course
she was asking me to humiliate myself. For the past eleven years, I’d kept a secret scorecard between us, but now I was certain she was keeping her own scorecard. She
lived
for the chance to one-up me. Worse, she knew her score doubled mine and she was still running up the points. Which made her not only a bully, but a bad sport.

I held out my hand. “Let me see your ID.”

Marcie lifted an uncaring shoulder. “I forgot it.”

We both knew she hadn’t forgotten her driver’s license, and we both knew it wasn’t her birthday.

“We’re really busy tonight,” I said, feigning apology. “My manager wouldn’t want me to take time away from the other customers.”

“Your manager would want you to keep your customers happy. Now
sing
.”

“And while you’re at it,” Ethan chimed in, “bring out one of those free chocolate cakes.”

“We’re only supposed to give out one slice, not a whole cake,” I said.

“We’re only supposed to give out one slice,” Addyson mimicked, and the table erupted with laughter.

Marcie reached into her handbag and pulled out a Flip camera. The red power button blinked on, and she aimed the lens at me. “I can’t wait to spam this video to the entire school. Good thing I have access to everyone’s e-mail. Who would’ve thought being an office aide would be so useful?”

She knew about the diary. She had to. And this was payback. Fifty points to me for stealing her diary. Twice that many to her for sending a video of me singing “Happy Birthday, Marcie” to all of Coldwater High.

I pointed over my shoulder at the kitchen and slowly backed up. “Listen, my orders are piling up—”