Guilt (13 page)

Avoiding any further contact with the Freak's gaze, Claire allowed her attention to set more freely on the door. Any moment now the bell would ring and Corry would come in, she would meet his eyes and smile in a way that would assure him that she liked him the way he liked her.

The bell rang. No Corry. Class started. Still, no Corry. Claire missed most of Mr. Dart's instructions for the day, continuing to eye the door for her friend's late arrival. He didn't come.

When the art assignment began, she sat there staring at a blank piece of paper, numbing herself to the meaning of Corry's absence. He sure seemed to be going out of his way to avoid her.

"So," the Freak interrupted her lack of contemplation, "where's your boyfriend?"

Claire looked up at him, displeased with his tease, but quickly lowered her head to her work, and hid behind her loose hair when she felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She wasn't about to reward the Freak with a blush over such a question.

She drew aimless lines on her paper. Did Corry skip class? Or did he feign illness to avoid school all together? He felt
that
upset over Claire's initial response to his request for a date?

Because he didn't come to class, it meant that Claire couldn't tell Corry that she changed her mind. It meant no date with Corry the next day. The weekend now looked more formidable where it had formerly been so promising in her imagination.

She sulked for the rest of the period and on through algebra. By the time she got home, she only had enough energy to slink to her bedroom, where she closed herself in for the night to wallow in the heartache of a missed opportunity.

There was always Monday, always another Saturday for a date. Corry couldn't avoid her forever. Still, that thought didn't exactly lessen the immediate dejection.

Chapter Seventeen

This time I went to bed prepared. Granted, a glass (or two) of red wine and a couple of ibuprofen didn't bode well for my liver, but I would have done anything for a decent night sleep. My cast-iron twin mattress was not going to get the best of me this time.

And it didn't until the wine and pain reliever wore off. Three o'clock in the morning again, and I couldn't sleep any longer on what might as well have been a slab of granite. Lying there became more than I could bear, but moving to get up took more strength than I had.

Struggling to push up so that I could move myself to a sitting position on the side of the bed, I almost cried out at the dull ache in my lower back and the piercing pain in my neck. The muscles at my right shoulder blade tensed up, so I tried stretching my arms forward to loosen them. What a big mistake. The twinge in my neck shot up and into the back of my head, and left my entire scalp throbbing and tingling.

I rose with difficulty from the bed to stagger towards the bathroom, where I could find more ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. No doubt about it, this place made me feel old before my time. If (and that was still a big
IF
at this point) I ever came back here again, I decided that I would stay in a hotel – or actually a bed and breakfast, since there were no hotels within twenty miles of this place.

Tiptoeing down the hall, debating just how many ibuprofen I could take without overdosing, I heard a muffled clamor break through the stillness outside. It was a racket I recognized from my childhood. The sound of trashcans falling over.

Woods and fields surrounded most of Brickerton, so there were a lot of wild animals that wandered into town, especially at night. Mom had even seen a bear meander into our back yard from across the railroad tracks one late morning when Lil and I were at school, and our neighbor had confirmed the sighting. That caused a mad hunt and bear relocation effort within the community for the safety of the area's citizens.

Since the bear crossed back over the tracks, it was surmised that it headed towards the high school woods, which were not far beyond. It was my freshman year, and I remembered the strange evacuation of the school building in order to get the students safely home. Many of us were ushered out a few at a time as our parents, relatives or neighbors drove their vehicles up to the school's double doors. Others were herded into buses. Going home had been a long slow process that day, but it had also been the most exciting event of my entire life up to that point.

Knowing that the trashcans were stored on a platform below Lil's old room, I crept in there to have a look. Climbing up onto the bed that was pushed up against the room's one window, I arched my neck as much as the pain would allow, and looked down at the cans below. (Mental note, Lil's bed felt softer than mine. Why the hell hadn't I thought to try sleeping in here?)

The trashcans were overturned, but I couldn't see much beyond that in the dark. I scanned the yard, expecting to see shadows or maybe the beady glowing eyes of raccoons. What I witnessed instead was the furtive outline of someone running into the darkness of the thicket.

A person traipsing through my parent's backyard wasn't necessarily unusual. My dad never put a fence up around the property, and so it made easy access. For years, it had been used as a shortcut for teenagers who were late for school. I even traversed the well-worn path through the thicket and over the tracks to get to first period class most mornings (Yes, I was often tardy, myself. Another bad habit of mine.).

Still, a small town like this was asleep at three in the morning. People didn't run around these hours of the night. More importantly, the trashcans were not in the path of the short cut. A person would have to go out of his way to knock them over. Perhaps the neighborhood had a human scavenger?

Contemplating the details of what might have happened began to exhaust me. So, I leaned back on the pillow and felt myself sink into the bed. Should have known that Lil would have the better mattress. The aches didn't exactly go away, my muscles were already a mess, but the pain seemed easier to deal with. I felt my body slacken.

The sun was streaming in through the window before I realized I had fallen asleep. My toes were numb within my socks and my limbs were cold because I hadn't even taken the time to slip under the blankets before I dozed off.

I tested my back and neck muscles as I got up. They were stiff, but they definitely hadn't gotten any worse. Some more ibuprofen and a long hot shower might get me through the day. Either way, I would be sleeping in this bed again tonight, my last night in town.

After downing a few pills, I wandered downstairs. Mom was already up, and the coffee was already brewing. I took a seat in my old chair and helped myself to the Saturday morning tradition of raisin bran muffins. They may not sound all that appetizing, but hot out of the oven and smothered in butter, these muffins were definitely my favorite breakfast. It had been so long, I'd forgotten how much I missed them.

I asked my mom to give me the recipe so that I could make the muffins at home. She laughed and told me it was so simple that I didn't need to write it down. Then, she spouted off the instructions and lost me half way through preparing the wet and dry ingredients.

By the time she finished, I was ready to change the subject. "So, is it common for you and Dad to have trash crawlers in the middle of the night?"

Mom complained, "Oh, we have pesky raccoons on occasion. They make a big mess, same as always. Why? Did you hear some last night?"

"Well, actually, it looked like a person. I heard the cans fall over and went into Lil's room in time to see someone sneak off towards the tracks."

"A person in the middle of the night?" Mom questioned. "Seems strange. You sure it wasn't a deer, or something?"

"It looked like a person to me." Maybe it was a coincidence. Perhaps someone walked through just after some animal knocked the cans over?

I offered to go out and clean up the mess that had likely resulted from the nocturnal prowler. If I didn't do it, Dad would have to. It'd be nice to save him the trouble for once.

After putting on some jeans, borrowing my mother's fluffy bathrobe and pulling on Dad's rubber boots, I stomped outside to take on the debris. The cans were overturned, as expected, but the trash bags weren't torn apart. Clearly, this was not the work of a raccoon. No such animal would leave the garbage untouched.

I righted the cans, and hefted them back onto the platform. Just behind the trashcans the rain gutter drainpipe extended down from the roof. This drainpipe ran beside Lil's bedroom window, and had been her method of sneaking out of the house in former years. Such a small person like Lil could climb up and down the pipe without doing much damage.

There appeared to be damage now, though. It was dented and warped as though it hadn't held up to some weight that was pressing on it. I couldn't imagine that Dad would leave a damaged drainpipe on the house. He had always been meticulous about such details. So, did someone try to climb the pipe? And was it the same person I saw sneaking into the trees last night?

I found Dad in the garage, and coaxed him outside to take a look at the pipe. He looked as though the sight of it was new to him, so I told him about my suspicions, and suggested that someone might have tried to get in.

Dad muddled the idea over for a moment before he rewarded me with an amused grin. "You mean a burglar, Claire-bear?"

"Well," I got a little offended by his tone of voice, "someone who didn't belong."

"Kidd-o," Dad padded me on the back, "I think you've been living on the west coast for too long."

"Oh, yeah? How do
you
explain this damage, then?" I asked.

"Could be plenty of things," he replied. "Like the weather. Wind's been pretty nasty these past couple of nights. You haven't heard it howling out here?"

No, I hadn't heard any howling wind. I heard the train the other night and the trash cans last night, so I couldn't be going deaf. Still, Dad's explanation seemed reasonable enough.

"Fine." I gave in and turned back towards the side door of the house. It was too cold out here for me right now. If Dad felt unconcerned about it, then I wouldn't bother to be concerned, either. Besides, he might have been right. Maybe I had developed a big city paranoia.

Chapter Eighteen

Claire had chores to occupy her time, but not to occupy her mind. Saturday morning was spent dusting the knickknacks, vacuuming the stairs and taking out the trash. Her mom kept finding household tasks for her and Lil to perform. Ordinarily, the two girls groaned about spending their weekend in such a fashion; but, this time, Claire just went through the motions without complaint.

She'd hoped that activity would prevent her from remembering the missed opportunity of spending the day with Corry. She hadn't really known how she would have gotten out of the chores if she had agreed to see him, since Mom didn't approve of her daughters dating while in high school; but Claire would have come up with some kind of a lie.

Admittedly, that had been part of her intent the day before. After making Corry realize that she'd meet him, she would come up with a plan to make it happen: girl's volleyball try-outs, or study group at the library or some other such nonsense that she would never really do. Turned out, she didn't have to lie to her parents, after all. The idea, though, that she had been willing to fabricate such a fib (especially when it meant stooping to Lil's level) left her feeling just a little bit guilty - but that was a typical reaction of hers.

The trouble with being around the house, and around her family, was that Mom noticed her moping. The aggravating, albeit well meaning, woman pestered her frequently about what was wrong. Why did Claire have that wounded look on her face? Why did she slouch as she headed to the basement to fetch the laundry from the dryer? Why didn't she eat more than one raisin bran muffin at breakfast? Why didn't she protest even slightly when she was told to clean the downstairs toilet?

Mom wasn't stupid. She knew when her precious baby wasn't behaving normally. She just didn't know why, and it bothered her to the point in which she nagged her daughter nonstop. Claire started to work as much to avoid her mom as she did to avoid her own upset feelings.