Fireworks: A Holiday Bad Boy Romance (30 page)

I stood up and
brushed my hair back, doing my best impression of my sister's hair flip. Sienna
never let other people bother her. My sister would have cut the strange phone
call short twenty seconds after it started. On the other hand, I was wracked
with guilt. I felt as if Ms. Alice was trying to tell me something and I had
not done a good job of helping her spit it out.

Despite the guilt,
I brushed my hair and got ready to join Darla at the gamer party. I moved
quickly and was out the door before I could even shut my abandoned textbook.

"Oh, sorry.
Excuse me," I said.

The taller of the
campus security guards held up both hands. "Whoa, slow down. Are you Quinn
Thomas?"

My stomach turned
sour. "Yes?"

"Your advisor
is Alice Bonton?" he asked.

"Yes. Wait, what's
going on?" I asked.

His rotund partner
shoved his hands in his pockets and scowled. "Your advisor needs you to
meet her at Alton Tower. We're here to give you a lift. That's all we
know."

"Please come
with us, Ms. Thomas." The taller guard stepped aside and ushered me past.

I took a step
before I saw the sharp look pass between the two men. "What is this all
about? Has something happened?"

Neither said a
single word more. I fought the urge to run and instead walked downstairs and
out the front doors. The fat guard waved a thick hand towards the campus
vehicle. My feet froze and an angry buzzing started in my ears. The taller
guard stepped around me and opened the passenger side door, relegating his
partner to the backseat.

"Where are we
going?" I asked.

The lanky man
folded himself into the driver's seat. Instead of answering, he turned the key
in the ignition. I tried to close my eyes and take a calming breath, but an
incessant flashing of lights stopped me. An ambulance drove past and joined the
whirling lights of a police car not far away.

Alton Tower.
That's where the guard said my advisor was waiting. I knew it because it was my
sister's dorm.

The campus vehicle
bucked the curb and drove right onto the lawn outside Alton Tower. Another
campus security Jeep, the police car, and the ambulance blocked the front door
of the dorm. I sat in the car, not sure where I was supposed to go.

Ms. Alice
appeared, skittering around the front of the police car. She ran up to my door,
and I could see she was talking before she opened it. "Quinn, I'm so
sorry, but I was afraid you wouldn't answer if I called back."

"What is
going on?" I asked. I gripped the side of the passenger seat and refused
to get out.

"There's been
a… Um, well, an accident," my advisor said. She reached for my hand.

"My sister?
Is Sienna alright?" I slapped away Ms. Alice's hand and vaulted from the
security vehicle. The rotund security guard tried to stop me, but he was too
slow getting out of the backseat.

"Wait, Quinn,
stop. Let me tell you what happened," Ms. Alice said.

The raw agony in
her voice made me stop, but I could not turn around. She slipped around to
stand in front of me and held out her hands. I crossed my arms tightly and
waited for my advisor to speak.

"Sienna
committed suicide tonight."

I laughed. The
sound fired out of me. The two security guards backed off as if I brandished a
gun. "That can't be right. Sienna would never do that."

"Quinn, I'm
so sorry. Her roommate came back from the library and found her in the
bathtub–"

"She slit her
wrists?" I asked. The world was spinning away and getting smaller. It felt
as if everything around me was shrinking onto a television screen and some
terrible after school special was on.

"Please,
Quinn, come sit down," my advisor begged.

I yanked my arm
away from her reaching hands. Before my thoughts returned to my body, I had
started running. I dodged around the ambulance before the fat guard could catch
up. His lanky partner tried to cut me off on the front steps, but I spun out of
his reach. The guards keeping the front hall clear were too shocked to move. I
slammed into the stairwell and ran up two steps at a time.

Sienna lived on
the second floor at the end of the hall.

"Quinn, no!
That's her sister," Sienna's roommate cried as I ran past where she sat
wrapped in a blanket in the stairwell. The EMTs in the doorway called out, but
I could not stop.

A detective in a
gray suit looked up as I barreled through the door of Sienna's dorm room. His
bright badge and ashen face stopped me.

"Is it true?"
I asked.

"You're the
sister?" he asked. His gray eyes swept towards the bathroom door. "I
wouldn't."

He made no move to
stop me, seeming to understand that I had to see for myself. I lurched towards
the bathroom and stopped two feet short of the threshold. A wet puddle of bath
water mixed with dark blood inched towards the door.

Sienna was gone.
My perfect sister with her flawless beauty and driving ambition was gone.

I sank to the
floor, unsure gravity could keep me from spinning away. I clung to the rug with
both hands – Sienna's outrageously-priced woven rug she had begged our parents
for last Christmas. I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard. Sienna would never
forgive me if I threw up on her rug.

#

Sienna's
dorm room was not more than a small box. The forensic photographer worked
around me while two police officers joined the detective. They spoke at a
regular volume, fully aware that shock had rendered me deaf to their words. I
could not understand what they were saying.

"Everything
seems to line up: high pressure major, friends say she was very focused, her
schedule is intense. There's no major event, no tipping point so far," one
of the uniformed officers said.

"Pretty
typical," the detective agreed.

I gripped the rug
so hard I felt my knuckles creak. The tears were building, a hard pressure
pounding in my head, but they would not come. Only ragged breaths escaped, and
each one hurt my throat. I wanted to cry, I had no idea what else to do, but I
could not.

Sienna always knew
what to do next. I always joked she would have made an excellent cruise
director. At home, she had all of us scheduled down to the next five minutes
during the holidays. I needed her to tell me what to do now.

I gasped for air.
The detective stepped to the door of the dorm room and waved an arm down the
hallway. In a moment, one of the EMTs sat on the floor next to me.

"Here,"
he said. "Take this. It’s a low dose anti-anxiety pill. It'll help calm
you down."

It was something
to do, some small action to get me off the rug and standing on shaking legs. I
took the pill and let the EMT help me up. He stood firmly between me and the
bathroom and held out his arms to usher me out the dorm room. Two men and a
black stretcher waited in the hallway.

They were going to
take Sienna's body away.

"Can I go
with? I want to go with," I asked the EMT.

He shook his head.
"Stop talking like that or you'll be overnight in the psych ward. You're
going back to your dorm room to call your family."

A warm numbness
spread through my body as the EMT escorted me downstairs to the campus security
guards. Everything seemed far away and soft. I imagined my life becoming a
video game, the origin story of some dark superhero. The flashing lights of the
police cars, the open doors of the ambulance, the arrival of the coroner's van,
they were all on a screen. I was safe on the couch in my dorm room, dozing as I
watched the introduction.

If only it had all
been a bad dream.

And then, I was on
my dorm room couch. My roommate paced the floor in front of me. Her long,
delicate fingers weaving together and squeezing with nervous energy. She spoke
to me, occasionally sat next to me and tried to talk, but I could not hear
anything she said.

"It's all
over campus by now. I'm not sure you should stay here. People are going to be
coming by and now's not the time. Right? Quinn?" she asked.

Darla kept going
to the door. She never opened it, just called through, but the knocks kept
coming at regular intervals. I could feel Darla's nervousness growing. She
wrung her hands and stood exhausted in the middle of our small room. In my hazy
mind, she became the gatekeeper. Was I a prisoner or the hidden princess?

Sienna had been
the princess. My father called her Princess all the time. There was no way she
would be sitting in a fog during a crisis like this one. She would have had
everything organized by now.

I felt like I
could not even blink without a colossal effort.

The next knock on
the door was a rapid, insistent rap. Darla leapt to answer it and this time she
pulled the door open. Alice Bonton slipped in our dorm room and locked the door
behind her.

"She hasn't
called her parents yet. She hasn't even moved," Darla told Alice.

"Quinn,
honey, we need to call your parents. Let's do it now so they can come here and
get you," my advisor said.

I shook my head.
Somehow this was all my advisor's fault. If I had not answered the phone call
from her, none of this ever would have happened. Sienna would still be alive
and studying her night away. And, I would be slipping into the world of
Dark Flag
with Darla at the gamer party.

"I'm going to
dial the phone and hand it to you, alright?" Ms. Alice asked.

"What I am
supposed to say?" I croaked. "They are never going to believe
me."

"Believe
you?" she and Darla both asked at the same time.

"Sienna would
never do something like that," I said. The images came back to me and the
room in front of me faded away to darkness. Every time I tried to think of why,
how Sienna could do that to herself, a giant chasm opened in my mind.

"Do you want
me to tell them?" my advisor asked.

The phone was
ringing and my mouth went dry. I nodded just as I heard my father's voice.

"Hello, Mr.
Thomas? I'm sorry to be calling so late. This is Alice Bonton from UCLA. I'm
your daughter Quinn's advisor. What? No, she hasn't done anything. Quinn is
fine. I'm actually calling about Sienna."

There was a long
pause on our end. I assumed my father had launched into a righteous lecture
about the rudeness of the late night phone call. He was a busy man, probably
due in court early the next morning, and he did not put up with such
thoughtlessness from people.

If I had called,
the lecture would have been the same.

"Yes, I did
say I was calling about Sienna," Ms. Alice said.

And that was the
difference. When it registered the phone call was about my sister, my father
changed completely. I could almost hear him politely giving my advisor leave to
speak, even though she stood a few feet away from me.

"There is no
easy way to tell you this, but there has been an accident and Sienna Thomas is
dead," Ms. Alice said. She looked as if she had fumbled a live hand
grenade. "No, you're right, I should be more specific. Your daughter was
found in her dorm room bathtub. She had cut her wrists. She was pronounced dead
at the scene."

My father was a
lawyer and must have switched into default mode because Ms. Alice spent the
next ten minutes giving short, factual answers to his questions.

Finally, she
cleared her throat. "Sir, I have your other daughter here. Wouldn't you
like to speak with her?" Ms. Alice did not wait, she just handed me the
phone with a barely disguised expression of relief.

He was still
talking when I took the phone. "I'm going to need the name of the
detective and the uniformed officers. I have her roommate's contact information
somewhere."

"Daddy?"
I asked.

"I'm going to
have to lie to your mother until this is all cleared up. She can't handle news
like this. We'll tell her Sienna was hurt in a car accident. I'll be there in
the morning, Quinn. 8 am sharp in your lobby," he said.

The line went
dead. I dropped the phone on the floor and lay down on the couch. Darla pulled
my comforter off my bed and laid it over me as I curled up in a ball.

Somehow, my body
woke up at 7:30 am. On autopilot, I showered and dressed and walked downstairs
to meet my father.

He was early and
impatiently waiting. "Did you talk to her roommate last night?"

"No."

"But you went
to her room? The detective said you were there," my father asked.

"Yes. I saw,
I saw…" I stopped and clung to the mailboxes in the foyer.

My father pulled
open the front door. He then grabbed my elbow and escorted me out in front of
him. "We're going to the coroner's. Didn't you tell me you went there with
your class? That's my girl, never flinching when there's something useful to
learn."