Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen (12 page)

“What?” My heart pounds

“Have. You. Kissed. Colt.” She crosses her arms. “Be honest because I'll probably find out anyway.”

I should have told her sooner. During one of the many times that she apologized for her behavior after Ruth died, I should have said, “Listen, we all make mistakes—this one time when I went to see Colt in jail . . .” I should have
mentioned how repulsive I found it so she would know I wasn't trying to date him, or something.

“It was nothing, and it was forever ago,” I plead now. “Well, it was, like, two months ago. But you and I weren't even nominally friends yet, and he and I were both crazy. Ruth had just died.” Tears prick my eyes and I swipe at them, hating all this. “I'm not—look, just because you find him hot doesn't mean everybody does. Personally I find him repulsive.” It doesn't come out the way I wanted it to.

“I wasn't even going to send that letter to Ralph—I just wrote it so that I could go on thinking of you as a tool. You know so I wouldn't . . . get attached.” Nothing comes out like I want it to.

“Nice.” Her lip curls. “You're such a flipping hypocrite. All your ladies-liberation bullcrap. You go around saying I should be empowered, and then you talk behind my back, calling me a bimbo, talking about my tits—even I talk less shit than that. Maybe I'm more of a feminist than you. You think you're so much better than everyone, and that you're in this great relationship. But how great can it really be if Davey tried to kill himself?”

I want to sit down. I want to go back in time to before Dom called me downstairs, back when I was still giving
Libby advice, and she was listening, and we were both in my pajamas.

“I made up the blood-alcohol thing,” she says. Her voice is flat, dead, but her mouth is still smiling. “I played along because I knew you were weird about investigations. You're always talking about how you solved Ruth's murder—”

“I did—”

“And I felt obligated to take care of you,” she continues, raising her voice, “to make things right with her, so I made up the blood-alcohol thing, and I shoved some vanilla candles and some of my mom's roses in my purse thinking I could stage some kind of romantic scene at his house and when you and I went there I stuck them in his room.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn't want you to think he'd killed himself to get out of having sex with you!” She hoists her bag up higher on her shoulder. “Everyone knows he's only your boyfriend because he feels sorry for you. Why else would somebody date Crazy Kippy?”

“You write letters to serial killers,” she says, shoving past me. She gives me a quick look like
those are the facts
before storming down the hallway toward the stairs.

Big stupid tears are rolling into my mouth.

“Libby, come back—”

“You spy on innocent strangers,” she shouts from the stairwell, stomping down the steps. “You hook up with your dead friend's boyfriend, and then when that doesn't work out, you go after her brother, and
then
when
that
doesn't work, you let some big-nippled freak fuck you with an antler.”

“Go to hell,” I yell, but she's already slamming the front door.

I wait for Dom to shout out, “Is everything okeydokey?” so that I can wail, “No!” and have somebody comfort me. But then I remember he's left already.

“Fine,” I scream to no one, slamming my own door so hard that I hope Libby can hear it from the driveway. Then I sit down on the carpet and cry until I think my body will break in half. Everything bad has happened, everyone good has gone, but so far nothing has hurt worse than the realization that I am irreparably and irrefutably insane.

Ralph and Albus and
I are sitting on a tiny twin bed at Cloudy Meadows, laughing about something. We're wearing those pajamas—the ones without any drawstrings so that we can't hang ourselves. Albus tells Ralph that her real name is Adele Botkins, but that he should call her Sir Albus. They get on the floor and use crayons to draw a map of the basement so that I can escape.

“You go ahead,” Ralph says. He's making cocoa now. “We'll stay here.”

Before I leave I tell Albus I'm afraid he might hurt her. She puts her little hands on my face and says, “You're going to be great and I know it.”

“How?”

“Because I'm not crazy, Corporal, and neither are you.”

I can see the door leading out of Cloudy Meadows and know
I'll be safe if I can just get through it—but then I see Davey in our living room. “They made it look like a home,” I say, running toward him. “You've got to come with me. We need to warn people.”

Albus is screaming, being murdered. I know I have to make a choice and I choose Davey.

He grabs me and kisses me. Christmas carols are playing on Dom's stereo.

“Did you know this is my favorite song?” Davey whispers in my ear. “The lyrics are like Ativan.”

I forget what I was rushing for. “You like the part where they sing, ‘Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices,'” I say. “You told me before, when you were alive—”

I hug him because I'm sorry.

We laugh. He's still alive.

“‘O hear the angel voices'—but are they angels or devils?” he says. “Who are you falling on your knees for? Who are you vulnerable to?”

“Now there's a question for English class.” I want to change the subject. “I'm vulnerable to you,” I say.

He hoists me up around his hips so that I'm hugging him like a koala bear. “The song means you have to listen to the crazy stuff inside your head, Kippy.” He squeezes me too tight. “Crazy Kippy.”

What crazy stuff?
I want to ask him.

What voices in your head?
I want to say.

But he's squeezing me too tight.

I can't breathe.

I jolt awake, my head wedged between two couch cushions, and check my phone. It's only ten p.m. The pills must have made me doze off.

I didn't try to kill myself or anything. (I guess that's one way to figure out you're not suicidal: You find pills, you take the doctor-prescribed amount, and you don't want any more.) It's just that after hating on myself for however long following Libby's weird departure, I felt like I was having a heart attack/falling into a volcano, and also like maybe I was going to do something I'd never done before, something weird and “counterproductive” (to put it lightly), like dig my nails into my own arm or break my hand punching the wall a million times. So I tore through the medicine cabinet and found an old prescription bottle of Ativan from Dr. Ferguson, from when I first got out of the hospital. I popped a double dose (
Take 1–2 per day for panic attacks
, the bottle read) and sat on the couch in front of the TV, nodding at the evangelical channel before eventually falling asleep.

I feel great, actually. Or at least I don't feel like the world is ending. The thing about Ativan, I guess, is that it makes you look at yourself and say,
I
understand
that you might
feel
like you're covered in magma, but it's not real magma,
the magma is in your mind, and it's going to pass.

Also:
You made a mistake and you need to apologize to Libby. But crossing a few things off your evidence list doesn't mean the whole investigation is kaput.
The Ativan said that, too.

I smile.
Thanks, Ativan
.

Then I pick up my cell and dial Jim Steele's home number.

“Hullo.”

“Hi, Jim?”

“Kippy?”

“Were you asleep?”

“No,” he says groggily. “Just a little drunk and watching the evangelical channel.”

“Me too—well, minus the drunk part.” I decide not to tell him about the Ativan. “Weird.”

“Yes, that is why I like the evangelical channel,” he says. “Because it's weird.”

“Any news on the Chewbacca head?”

“Oh, that.” I can imagine him rubbing his own head. “Yes. I'm meeting the guy tomorrow. He wouldn't give me his name but I plan to throw a lot of legal mumbo jumbo at him and get the head.” He yawns. “I'll, uh, tell you if I recognize him or anything.”

“Yeah, and any distinguishing features—even if they're personality based.” I pull out my list and ignore
the cross-outs. Libby might have been right about me being a bad friend, but that doesn't mean she's right about everything—or that she was even telling the truth necessarily about half the stuff she said.

In a business like mine, you can't trust anyone.

I don't know if Dollar Dan would necessarily be smart enough to
not
give his name to an interested buyer online. But does that rule him out as a suspect?

“Kippy?” Jim says.

“Yeah, sorry, did you say something?”

“I said, ‘Are you going to the Frostbite Challenge tomorrow?'”

I swallow. Libby and I had talked about going together and I feel a hot rush of self-loathing come over me.

But then it passes.

Thanks, Ativan
.

“Yeah, I think I'll go,” I say.

“I'll be there for when they announce the winners. We can discuss the whole Chewbacca-head thing then.”

“Cool.”

“Cool,” he says, imitating me.

“Whatever.”

“Whatever.”

“You're drunk.”

He sighs. “I am. Good night, Kippy Bushman.”

“Night.”

I put down the phone and snatch the remote to switch off the TV. I can only take so much evangelical channel before it stops feeling like an anthropological study and starts sounding like church, which I couldn't deal with
after Mom died. I think back to what Dom said about the devil. Has he always been so weird, or is he just starting to seem weirder because I know what a weirdo
I
am?

I flip through my phone to check my email. I've got one new message.

“Huh?” I mumble. What does Mrs. Fried mean she hasn't heard from me? I wrote back to her first note right away. I search for her name in my email and two separate addresses pop up. There's the one she just wrote me
from (which is the one she usually writes me from) and [email protected].

Mrs. Fried has the tendency to be a little cold, but that email was so unlike her.

Who was emailing me from the hotwahoo address? Who even uses hotwahoo anymore?

Probably whatever creep went after Davey. And potentially whatever guy Jim Steele is going to meet tomorrow.

There's only one way to find out.

I punch the fake hotwahoo address into a new email.

The whole town will be there. That's almost seven hundred people. Hopefully I'll be safer in a crowd.

A new message comes through almost immediately.

I take a screenshot and text it to Mrs. Fried. I cut out the part about whoever hurt Davey because I don't want to frighten her. She'd probably call Staake.

I zone out to TV for a while—some
Twilight Zone
episode about a guy making a pact with a demon for more and more money, but his life just keeps getting worse and worse.

My phone buzzes.

Text from Kippy (mobile):

Probably just spam! Thank you for your email. . . .

She attaches a picture of Davey, completely unconscious in the hospital bed with tubes coming out of him.

I cringe.
Parents.
Then I take a deep breath and write back to the mystery emailer:
Sounds good
.

I know that Ralph doesn't have access to email in prison, but I just know in my gut that he's behind this. Whoever's helping him on the outside—whoever's responsible for Davey's current state—could have created this fake address to throw me off the scent.

I take another look at my list.

I tap my pen against the crinkly sheet of paper. If I'm right, and the fake emailer is the same person meeting
up with Jim Steele tomorrow, then I've got to warn him. He's pretty street smart, but who knows who we're up against?

I redial him on my phone, but it goes straight to voice mail. He must have passed out.

“Um, hello, Jim?” I say as soon as it beeps. “I'm not very good at messages. Just uh, be careful tomorrow, okay? I know you think I'm crazy about this, but . . . I don't know, maybe you shouldn't go at all. I mean, maybe you don't need to. I think the same guy is coming to meet me, so . . . call me in the morning or something.”