Out of Order (9 page)

“We’ll need anything with blood on it,” the officer with the notebook said after he had left, looking between my mother and I with a strange expression creasing his brow. It looked a little like concern, but I was still seething too much to care about his concern, real or imagined.

“Can you give us some privacy?” my mother asked carefully. A muscle jumped in her cheek, betraying her impatience with the situation. I’d never seen her so frazzled, and I’d watched her interrogate gangbangers threatening to do horrible things to her without flinching. Her eyes had never glistened with tears under the threat of any number of tortures.

“We need to take some photographs first,” the other officer cut in, and I watched as my mother bit the inside of her cheek. It looked hard enough to draw blood.

The photographs were taken on the officer’s iPhone, which my mother found highly unprofessional and did not hesitate to state that fact. I held out my arms with my palms up, and then down, and then put them down by my sides for the pictures taken of my dress and legs. My mother stood behind the officer taking the pictures, watching carefully to make sure not a single shot contained my face.

My father returned before long, puffing like he’d run down a flight of stairs and bearing in his arms a pair of children’s pajamas patterned with koala bears.

“It was all they had,” my father explained breathlessly as he placed the pajamas on the bed, his eyes apologetically searching my face for embarrassment or resentment toward him. I felt neither.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and began to peel off my tights while my mother ushered the policemen around the curtain. The tights clung to my skin, glued by dried blood at the knees and calves. Pulling them free stung my skin, like ripping off Band-Aids.

My mother helped unzip my dress from the back, her delicate fingers brushing my shoulders as she pulled down the straps, and the dress fell into a heap on the floor. I stepped out of the pile of tulle deftly and picked up the pajamas, not once looking at either of my parents as I pulled the top over my head and struggled to get my legs into the bottoms. The elastic cuffs hit me at the elbows and midcalf, constricting my movements. I rolled up the sleeves so that I could bend my arms, though it felt like the cuffs were cutting off blood flow.

“I want to go home,” I said again, finally looking at my father’s face and acknowledging the look of sympathy and sadness washing across it in waves. “Now.”

My mother handed my clothes to the officers as my father led me around the curtain and into the brightly lit hospital ward. Barefoot, I walked gingerly over cold, sterile tiles and tried to ignore the strange looks being shot my way as I was marched down corridors that smelled like Pine-Sol. I felt extremely conspicuous in too-small pajamas and with my hair curled and pinned up still, styled by Kate in the hours before prom.

We took an elevator down into the underground garage where my father had parked, and without a word, he bent his back and knees as the doors opened to asphalt and concrete. I put my arms around his shoulders and allowed myself to be lifted, wrapping my legs securely around his thin waist. I felt like a child again, being carried around on my strong father’s back, though in the six or seven years since I’d done it, he’d become more hunched and bony than I remembered, and his footfalls seemed to echo loudly through the garage until we reached the car.

My feet never had to touch the ground as I was dropped into the backseat of the Volvo my mother drove to work each morning, commuting an hour and a half each way into the city, where there was work for a prosecutor. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window while my parents climbed into the front seats of the car and pulled out of the small garage and out into the night, which seemed already to be brightening with a touch of dawn.

Nothing ever happened in the town where we lived, with its long, quiet lanes and acres of apple trees that blossomed with big, pinkish flowers every spring. I watched those same trees flash by the window, illuminated into strange dark shapes with mushroomed tops by the low-hanging, old-fashioned streetlamps I often admired in the daytime. Our police station had six regular employees and a troop of volunteers who donned their uniforms only for the big parade that rolled through town at Christmastime to stand at the street corners directing traffic and spectators. In the winter, the streetlamps were piled with snow and icicles that the volunteers knocked off with old broom handles so they wouldn’t fall on the smattering of people who would line the streets to cheer on the high school band and road-roughened floats covered each year by boughs of fresh-cut evergreen.

I closed my eyes as the streetlamps flashing by triggered my nausea. Last winter Jessa had gone around with her younger sisters bringing cookies door-to-door to the elderly women on Surrey Lane and to friends of the family, which was just about everyone in town. The three of them, in matching knitted toques and mittens, had looked like something out of a TV Christmas special when they’d gotten to our house with a special basket for my family, their noses red with cold and their eyes smarting with tears. We didn’t really celebrate Christmas, but those girls managed to bring cheer into our house for the hour they stayed to warm up before they were off again with a basket for some other family.

We had one high school, one middle school, one hospital, one police station, one grocery store, and a community center where the Canoe Club met three or four times during the summer for races and open houses. All this spread out through twisting, dead-end roads that never ran straight for more than a quarter mile, with sprawling homes on acres of land bought generations ago, and smaller, newer ones like ours closer together near the center of town. We didn’t have a public library or a community pool, no homeless men on corners or drug dealers lurking in dark alleys. It was a quiet, crimeless town. We’d moved here when I was in the third grade, after my mother had her first murder case that involved a child. She’d been worried about crime rates, had done research and found the safest area to buy a new house in an old neighborhood, close enough to commute and far enough that she could leave work behind her at the end of the day.

It was a safe place; everyone said so. Some people owned guns for hunting, but no one had been shot in years, not even by accident. There were no break-ins, no rapes, and certainly no murders. We were supposed to be safe here. What the hell had happened?

The car came to a stop, but I resolutely did not open my eyes. A film of tears had gathered under my eyelids, and to open my eyes would mean letting them escape. My parents got out of the car, hushing each other and speaking in stage whispers, assuming that I had fallen asleep.

“I don’t understand how this could have happened,” my mother said, sounding distressed. “This is a safe town. This kind of thing just doesn’t
happen
here.”

Her thoughts echoed my own, the incomprehensibility of the act itself a pulsing shadow over my brain.

A man walks into a diner. He is carrying a shotgun. He shoots three girls and an employee.

It sounded like the start of a terribly insensitive joke. Murder as the punch line: three people that you love are dead. A Latina, an Asian and two white girls walk into a diner. Only one walks out alive. Ha-ha. Isn’t it funny?

“I’ve got her. You hold the door.”

My father’s voice was surprisingly calm when he opened the car door. He reached across me to undo my seat belt and then slid one arm under my knees and the other around my torso. I tipped my head into his throat and loosely put my arms around his neck, instinctually making myself smaller, as though I could disappear into his chest. He grunted when he lifted me, but I didn’t open my eyes. I wasn’t ready to grow up yet.

He carried me into the house and upstairs to my bedroom with my mother running in front of him and holding open doors. I could hear her slippers on the hardwood that was so cold on my feet every morning.

I was placed into my bed without any lights being turned on, my father navigating by memory through the dark. He tucked the sheets around my body tightly, and I held my breath as he leaned down and pressed his lips to my forehead.

“Try to sleep, sweetheart,” he whispered, and I turned my face into my pillow to hide my tears. “Don’t dream tonight.”

He left and closed the door softly. I could hear my parents whispering on the landing, their voices too low to make out individual words. I tried to relax enough for sleep to take me, but a bout of shivers overtook my body, and I instead curled into a hard ball, wrapping my arms around my knees protectively.

I took deep, shuddering breaths and kicked off the covers my father had tucked so lovingly around me. All at once I felt both too hot and too cold. A chill rattled my teeth but sweat beaded on the back of my neck, as if I were feverish. The cuffs of the koala pajamas felt like they were cutting off the blood circulation at my elbows and knees. I lay still and breathed, tears leaking from under my tightly closed eyelids.

I was a child wearing the body of an adult like a costume, curled into the fetal position, not yet ready to be born. I cried until my aching limbs released their tight hold out of exhaustion, and I drifted densely toward sleep.

“I
FEEL
stupid,” I told Ricky as she adjusted her cat ears in the mirror. I was sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bathtub in a fairy costume while music thrummed from the party raging downstairs. It was strange, being at a party without Jessa or Kate. Kate had refused to go because the host was her ex, Mason Lowe, and Jessa’s family didn’t celebrate Halloween. “Why are we even doing this?”

“Why are we at a Halloween party, or why are we holed up in the bathroom?” Ricky asked, clearly not caring about the answer much. “Either way, the answer is Michael Lewczynski.”

I tried not to roll my eyes as I plucked ineffectually at the iron-tight cuffs of the Tinker Bell costume I’d been stuffed into. It belonged to Ricky and was about three sizes too small. “I know how we got here. I just don’t know why we’re
still
here.”

Ricky hemmed and hawed some more, as though weighing her options. She had never had a good poker face; if she so much as watched an R-rated movie without her father’s permission, the guilt would manifest on her face like a physical pain until she fessed up.

“Erica,” I said, pulling out the big guns. No one called her Erica to her face but Jessa and her grandmother, who was currently in the hospital with some kind of stomach bug.

“Okay okay. But it wasn’t
my
idea, alright? It was
Mike
’s idea, and you
know
how much I like him.”

If I’d been feeling apprehensive about going to this party before I knew that there were
ideas
involved, the feeling intensified by a factor of about nine thousand after Ricky divulged it. Ricky guiltily hopped from foot to foot, a strange imitation of the potty-dance.

“
What
was Mike’s idea?” I asked carefully, schooling my face to neutral instead of the strange mixture of rage and concern boiling under my ribcage.

“They’re going to play seven minutes in heaven,” Ricky whispered loudly, her cheeks pinking up at the mere thought. “And they’re… well….”

“
What?
”

“It’s rigged. They’re going to throw you in the closet with Lisa Zimmerman.”

“With
Lisa
?” I asked, reeling. “Why would they do that?”

“I thought they were going to put you with Lisa’s twin brother
Jared
, because the two of you had that thing junior year.” I opened my mouth to retort, and Ricky waved me off, her motormouth moving a mile a minute. “I
know
it was just one date and it was a
disaster
because he was a terrible kisser, but I remembered how much you’d liked him and I thought they were trying to get you guys back together! But
apparently
Jared told Lisa what happened and she said that you were obviously a
lesbian
and she would prove it so they’re going to—”

Ricky gasped and wheezed. “Breathe,” I told her slowly, still processing. “Breathe, Ricky. Come on.”

“—but I didn’t
know
that was the plan,” she continued as though she’d never left off when her breath came back a little. “I thought it was a meet-cute, not a
plot
! I don’t
want
to be part of a plot!”

“Alright. Okay.” I felt the simmer of anger boil off a little, replaced by a nervous energy.

“I didn’t know it was a plot to embarrass you, I swear. And then I thought hiding out in here might make it all go away!” Ricky wailed, hot tears of shame finally spilling over her blush-pink cheeks.

“If they think I’m a lesbian already, won’t you dragging me off to the bathroom for ages just make it look like you’re one too? And we’re hooking up?”

Ricky stopped crying to stare at me incredulously, her mouth hanging open. “I didn’t even think of that,” she said after a long moment of silence. “Why didn’t I
think
of that? Mike’s gonna think—!”

“Hush, Mike knows how much you like him. You drool over him like a puppy.” At Ricky’s hurt expression, I backtracked quickly. “Sorry. I mean, you obviously like him a lot. He’s not going to think you’re gay, I promise. It was kind of shitty of him to make you drag your friend to a party just to humiliate her, though.”

Ricky hung her head. The cat ears slipped off and hit the tile floor sadly. “I’m so sorry I got you into this.”

I shrugged. “Let’s just go home. We walk out of here with our heads held high.” I could see the objection forming on her lips and put a stop to it right there. “You say bye to Mike, and we leave.”

She nodded sullenly, and we left the bathroom together, walking side by side as if nothing had happened. Ricky still looked blotchy and her ears remained askew from when she’d hastily thrown them back on, but for the most part no one noticed. We reached the living room without hassle, and I pointed out Mike.