Out of Order (12 page)

“You’re hella memorable,” I said, smiling at her lazily.

I leaned forward to nuzzle Kate’s bare arm with my face, a gesture I wouldn’t hesitate to make to any of my close friends. Instead of patting my head some more or laughing, Kate reared back as though I’d bit her. One minute she was close enough that I could feel her breath by my ear and the next she was standing beside my bed, her arms crossed over her chest.

“I’m not gay,” she said abruptly. I blinked at her stupidly, wondering where that thought had come from.

“Hello, Not Gay, I’m Corinna,” I replied in my best deadpan, sitting up slowly and trying not to break into a smile. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“You kissed me!”

“No I didn’t, I was just bonking you with my head.” I pulled a face at her, expecting a laugh. When I didn’t get one, I let it fall away. “What are you talking about?” I knew that she had to be talking about the night she’d come to my place high and convinced me to snort cocaine—a sentence never before thought by the newly elected valedictorian of my small rural high school, I’m sure.

My hands felt clammy as I rested them on my knees, feeling at a distinct disadvantage. A deep chill came over me, and I began to wonder if this was going to be the end of our friendship as I knew it—the easy, playful banter, the pillow fights and sleepovers, the joking and roughhousing I knew and loved.

“The night we got high,” Kate said, confirming my suspicions. Her voice dropped low on the words “got high,” as though my dad could hear us from his home office in the den. “You kissed me.”

“You kissed me back!”

“I was
high
!” Kate didn’t even bother lowering her voice. She was frantic and showing it; her cheeks were reddening and sweat beaded at her hairline. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“I was high too, or did you forget that?” I countered, feeling suddenly attacked. “We were
both
high as kites that night. That stuff you got… it does weird things to people, clearly. So what if we kissed? Who cares? It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

My heart was racing, and I felt a frustrating heaviness behind my eyes that meant angry tears were near at hand. Being someone who cries when they’re angry can get incredibly exasperating during arguments. I locked my jaw and stared Kate down, hoping the fight would be over before any tears were spilled.

“So you’re not, like….” Kate waved her hands around making strange gestures, as though that would make her point for her. I furrowed my brow, and she sighed. “Putting moves on me?”

“No!” I bit back a feeling of disappointment. I had liked kissing her, but our friendship was more important to me than anything else. I was bailing water out of a sinking ship; I’d do anything to save it, even lie. “We’re just friends. It doesn’t mean
anything
!”

Kate lowered her eyes and moved her bare toes against the grain of my hardwood floor, a nervous tic of hers. Her toenails were painted magenta. “Ever since that night, everything you’ve done has seemed… different. Was I making it all up in my head? Reading into things?”

“You must’ve been. I haven’t been acting any differently.” I could think of at least two occasions where I’d deliberately touched her when there hadn’t been a need, and suddenly felt like the biggest skeevy idiot in the world. “I haven’t even been thinking about it.”
Lie
. “I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”
Lie
.

Kate laughed hollowly, still dragging her toes back and forth over a little knot in the wood. “Of course you didn’t. God, how insecure must I be to convince myself that everyone’s in love with me?”

“Hey, I love you, but that doesn’t mean I want in your pants,” I laughed, trying to defuse the tension that had crept into my life without me knowing. How long had I been making her uncomfortable? “I’m really sorry if I made you uncomfortable at all.”

“Don’t worry about it. I was just overthinking everything.” She sat down next to me on the bed suddenly, as though making a split decision. “So, valedictorian speech?” She smiled winsomely, as though the sight of her cute little bunny-teeth would set everything right.

Shaking my head to clear it of all the angry feelings and disappointment, I reached over the side of the bed and pulled my long-lost chemistry textbook up off the floor. “How about we study for chemistry instead? You know, like we said we were going to.”

Kate sighed, but acquiesced unhappily. Chemistry had never been her best subject.

M
Y
MOTHER
opened my blinds deftly, and I hissed and covered my eyes with my arms.

“You’ve slept enough today. It’s past three,” she said.

I rolled onto my stomach and pulled my pillow up over my head, a clear sign to leave me alone. But my mother is persistent, and she flung off the sheets covering my legs, exposing them to the cool air of my bedroom.

“Mom,” I groaned, just as the phone began to ring again. It had been ringing near-constantly between the hours of ten and midnight for the past two days, calls of condolences and
just checking in
and God knows what else. Funeral arrangements and police updates, if I had to harbor a guess—my mother would be involved in everything.

I’d been asked for again and again: “Do you think you can talk to Mrs. Fuentes?” No. “Honey, are you awake? Brandon’s on the phone.” Go away. “Sorry, Amanda, I don’t think Corinna can come to the phone right now. You understand, right?” Thanks, Dad. “The Fuentes girls are at the door.” Tell them I’m not ready yet.

I heard my father pick up the phone in the hallway, heaving a huge sigh before saying, “Hello?” There are only so many times you can listen to a grieving parent who wants to understand what happened to their child before you start being afraid to answer the phone. Everyone had questions for me, and I had no answers. All I did was sleep and cry, nibble at the plates of food left for me at regular intervals, and paw through last year’s yearbook.

I kept it open to the graduates when I wasn’t crying over it, on the page with Jacob Hastings’ picture. Jake Hastings: member of the rowing team, the track team, the FFA: Future Farmers of America. Nineteen years old, home from his first year in college for only a month, happy to have picked up a summer job so fast—according to the phone call I’d gotten from his father, the one time I’d dared answer the phone.

“What the hell happened to your laptop?” my mother demanded.

I drew my head out from under my pillow slowly, knowing I should feel ashamed but still too numb to even consider it. “It had a meeting with the wall,” I told her frankly, glancing toward the dent it had left in the drywall. My mother spotted the mark and looked at me with alarm.

“How the hell did that happen?”

“I got an e-mail from the prom photographer. Our pictures have been processed. You want to see them?”

Morbid curiosity had made me open the attachments to the e-mail. I’d been CC’d on all the photos from our group, having written all our e-mails down at the start of our photo session and not distinguishing whose was whose. Pictures of Jessa and Brandon that looked like wedding photos; group shots of the six of us smiling and goofing off; pictures with just the girls, and then the last one I opened before I threw the computer into the wall: Kate and I alone, our arms around each other—

I couldn’t stand it. The laptop was across the room before I had time to process that I’d thrown it. Where I had gotten the strength I still don’t know. When, after about an hour, I felt it safe to investigate the damage, I found it minimal. The purple plastic casing was cracked, but the LCD screen survived, and the laptop still booted up when I tested it.

My mother sat beside me on the bed, the laptop resting across her knees. “I know it’s only been two days,” she said, and I felt a pang of despair: only two days. The first two days of the rest of your life. “But you need to get out of bed. Shower, maybe go out on the porch? Eat something more substantial than Pop-Tarts and corn chips?”

“I’m not ready to go outside.” The weather had been beautiful, warm and sunny. The four of us would’ve been enjoying the weather; lounging about in our bathing suits trying to get some sun before graduation photos, spraying each other with the hose, watching out for Jessa’s little sisters as they ran through the sprinkler.

“You’ll have to tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow?” I sighed, curling up blanketless in the middle of the wide expanse of my bed. I’d had to ask more than a dozen times for a queen size before my parents gave in and upgraded from my old twin bed. It was perfect to fit two or three people in it for a sleepover. Fitting all four of us was pushing it, but we made do the few times it had actually happened.

“Honey, tomorrow is the thirtieth. It’s graduation.” She spoke slowly, as though saying it calmly would soften the blow.

“You
can’t
expect me to go.” My mother’s tight-lipped expression answered for her. “No. Absolutely not.”

“They’re expecting a speech,” my mother continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “The one you wrote before won’t do now, but we can rework it. You’re still the valedictorian. They can’t get someone else on this short notice.”

“You mean, you won’t let them get someone else. I bet someone called to ask if I could still do it. You told them I would do it, but I won’t.” I sat up and hugged my pillow to my heaving chest. Angry tears prickled my eyes. “I can’t and I won’t.”

“Your classmates deserve—”

“My friends deserve to be alive!” My mother stopped short. “They deserve to not be dead, and I deserve more closure than those bumbling idiots down at the police station are likely to give me. I deserve to be able to wake up in the morning without thinking that I should’ve done something to stop this—that it’s somehow my fault—” The angry tears spilled over, and I spluttered hopelessly. “And my friends deserve to get their diplomas and go off to college and get married and have kids and grow
old
.”

“I know they do, I know,” my mother said, putting the computer aside and pulling my head to her chest. “I know this is hard. I know.” She didn’t know
anything
. “Why don’t I just write the speech myself, and you can read it a little later once you’ve calmed down some?”

“You’re really going to make me go to graduation and read a speech?” I asked, dumbfounded by her callousness. “You’re going to make me walk across that stage without them?”

“You have to walk across that stage, and make your speech. You have to do it
for
them. Because they can’t.” She patted my knee uselessly and then stood, picking up my laptop to take with her. “They’re not here anymore, but that doesn’t mean the world stops. You must
go on
without them.”

She looked pleased with herself and her little motivational speech as she left my room, not quite closing the door all the way behind her. I wanted to scream, but I was left speechless.

What use was it to yell? She’d never understand. Life, to her, was a series of speeches, diplomas, accomplishments on paper that added up to a neat little life in the suburbs. Every day she saw the holes crime left in people’s lives, the anguish it caused, the damage. And every day she put those feelings in a little box on her desk at the firm and left it there when she came home.

She was in the wrong here, and I knew it. But she did have a point about one thing. The earth continued to turn, even without my friends on it. That meant I had to do things. Eat, shower, leave the house. I’d have to start living again. Maybe if I practiced going through the motions, one day it would seem natural again.

But not yet. It was still far too soon.

I
HAD
Kate cornered. After closing the door behind us and pitching us into darkness, I reached for the dangling chain that illuminated the glorified closet they called a coatroom. A single bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling, making the place feel like the interrogation room in a bad cop movie. No wonder the sign on the door said EMPLOYEES ONLY. It didn’t exactly fit with the rest of the hotel’s décor.

“What the hell was that about?” I demanded of the back of Kate’s head. She spun around to face me, her cheeks flushed so red that I could see it in the dismal lighting.

“I told you I wasn’t ready! I told you!” Kate stomped her foot on the cheap linoleum flooring. “I told you and you
pushed
.”

“I didn’t mean to.” A hollow feeling entered my chest. Had I really expected anything different?

The night had been going so well! After the slightly disappointing dinner and admittedly terrible prom video, the rest of the evening proved fun. The other girls and I jumped onto the dance floor as soon as it was socially acceptable, forming a dance-circle and jumping around best as we could in our high heels. It was all upbeat pop music to start, and when it started to slow, the groups began to divide into pairs.

The girls on the dance team stole the show. Brittany Reed grabbed Nathan Smith and led him through a whirlwind dance number that looked practically choreographed. Lillian Woodall danced circles around Josh Dunn while her best friend Dianna Knight danced all by herself but
owned
it. And of course Jessa and Brandon, absorbed utterly with each other, ignored them all as they danced together, completely in sync.

We
did
end up taking turns dancing with the two boys of our group; while Brandon and Jessa shared a few dances, I ended up dragging Robert onto the dance floor when it became clear he wouldn’t be working up the courage to dance with Ricky any time soon. He loosened up a little after a while, and when Brandon offered a hand to Kate for a dance after Jessa asked for a breather, Robert naturally extended his own to Ricky; suddenly the two were inseparable.