“You don’t like her because she verbs things?”
“I’m gonna verb you in a second.”
“Tease.”
“You wish,” Freddie said, but there was a hint of a smile playing on her lips. “Second, Ellen Cho’s been with Kelly Greenway since fucking conception.”
“Kelly who?”
Freddie threw up her hands and groaned. “Forget it. Back to Combs. I’ll tell you what I know if you tell me one thing about yourself you’ve never revealed to anyone else.”
“Deal.”
“Good,” Freddie said. “You first.”
The waitress dropped off two mugs of coffee that were stained on the outside. It didn’t inspire confidence in the food, but I ordered a plate of onion rings because they were nearly impossible to screw up and dunking them in the deep fryer would likely kill any lingering bacteria. While Freddie was quizzing the increasingly irritated waitress about the type of cheese used in the omelets, I tried to think of a secret to tell her that wasn’t too embarrassing. Finally, Freddie settled on a patty melt and fries and then folded her hands on the table and waited for my offering.
“The first time I got my period, I was hanging out with my mother at this animal shelter where she sometimes volunteers. I was twelve. Mama was always open with me about that stuff, but I still had no idea what to expect. Anyway, I went to the bathroom in the shelter, and when I pulled my pants down there was blood on the crotch. It wasn’t a lot, but the second I saw it, I fainted and hit my head on the side of the toilet. Mama found me ten minutes later passed out on the restroom floor.”
Freddie waved her finger in front of my face. “Lame. That doesn’t count.”
“Of course it does.”
“No it doesn’t,” she said. “You’re supposed to tell me a story no one else knows.”
The only thing that kept me from walking out was my desire to find out what Freddie had learned about David Combs. “Fine,” I said. “Something I’ve never told anyone else?”
“That’s the game.”
“I’m glad David Combs shot you.”
Freddie’s mouth fell open and her entire body tensed. She’d been expecting another embarrassing story about how my bikini top fell off at a public pool or how Mama caught me masturbating on the couch once, but she clearly hadn’t expected what I’d told her.
“That day at Starbucks, Fadil was trying to get me to talk to you. That’s why I approached your table. But I would have chickened out. I would have asked you if you wanted another drink or taken your trash or something stupid like that. David shooting you gave me the chance to heal you and finally get to learn who you really are. And I hate that he shot you, but I’m also glad.”
When Freddie finally recovered her ability to speak, she said, “That’s really fucked up.”
“Freddie—”
“You know what your problem is?”
I rolled my eyes before I could stop myself. “I’m sure you’re about to tell me in great detail using colorful language.”
“You’re scared,” she said.
“I can heal people, beams of light shoot from the sky when I do, I hear voices, and the world might be ending. Of course I’m scared. Your powers of observation are astounding, Dr. Freddie. Please, tell me more obvious things.”
Freddie went on like I hadn’t spoken. “Not just of that shit. Of everything. You play this shy, bullied, innocent routine, hoping one day everyone will magically realize how special you are. Meanwhile, you’re so afraid to even talk to a girl you like that it took some psycho shooting me for you to work up the nerve. It’s no wonder you can’t make a decision about the end of the world.”
The waitress dropped our food off wordlessly. For the record, I’d made a good choice with onion rings; Freddie’s patty melt looked like a soggy, grease-soaked mush platter, which didn’t stop her from digging in.
“You’re not worried about the end of the world,” Freddie said around a mouthful of greasy meat and cheese.
“Of course I am!”
Freddie shook her head and waited to speak until she’d wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Maybe you don’t know why the world is ending or why Combs shot me or how the world is ending or any of that shit, but you know what to do. You know what you want to do. You’re just so terrified it’s the wrong thing that you’re going along with what Fadil tells you and I tell you and the voices tell you. That way if you fuck everything up, you can blame it on someone else and no one will realize you’re not the special snowflake you’re so desperate to be.”
My face flushed to the tips of my ears as Freddie spoke. “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t grow up a freak. You don’t have people calling you a slut or Mary one moment and then begging you to heal their grandpa the next. If the voices had given you this ability, you’d probably hide out in your stupid art room, working on that crappy garbage sculpture.”
Freddie set her patty melt down and wiped her hands on her napkin. I was so certain she was going to walk out that I touched my phone through my pocket, preparing to call Fadil or Mama to beg one of them to pick me up.
“A) My sculpture may be garbage, but it’s not crappy. And B) if I did have your abilities, I’d be doing a fuck-ton more with them than you are.”
“Really? Like what?”
“For starters, I wouldn’t be stressing out over the kid who shot the girl I healed.”
“Except you called me claiming to have information about Combs, so obviously you have been,” I said.
“I’m the girl he shot. It’s different.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
Freddie pushed her plate out of the way with half the patty melt uneaten. Her voice had softened. The edge dulled. “Some nobody, some kid I never met before that day, shot me. He decided I didn’t deserve to live. He decided my life didn’t matter and that I would be better off with a bullet in me.” Freddie caught my eye and held it for a moment.
My own anger began to fade. “Maybe you were a convenient target.”
“Because convenience is the best reason to shoot a person. That clears everything up.”
“You’re twisting my words.”
“Why didn’t he shoot you?” Freddie asked. “You were closer. Why didn’t he fire into the store and hit one of a dozen people on the other side of the window? He shot me for a reason, and I need to know what it was.”
“You also wanted to know why I’d healed you, and look how that turned out.” A grim laugh escaped my throat.
Freddie narrowed her eyes and clenched her jaw. “David Combs didn’t profess his love for me before shooting me.”
“I never said I was in love with you. And you still haven’t explained why you get to care why he shot you but I don’t.”
“Since you healed me,” Freddie said, “everything feels different. My friends feel different; my family feels different. Either something is wrong with me or with the rest of the world. I can still see the person I was before, but I don’t recognize her. Hell, most of the time I don’t even like her, and I need to know if I deserved to be shot.”
I flared my nostrils, and my voice took on a tone that reminded me of Mama’s. “No one deserves that. Not you, not anyone.”
Freddie nodded like she understood, but her downcast eyes said maybe she didn’t. “Fine. Then I need to know if David Combs thought I deserved to be shot.”
I started to tell her “Of course he didn’t,” but I didn’t know that for sure. I was no closer to divining Combs’s motives than I had been that day in front of Starbucks. I wanted to tell her that there was nothing she could have done that would have justified David shooting her, but it worried me that she needed to hear it. I couldn’t comprehend how she could think for a moment that she’d deserved to be shot. If I’d been having the same conversation with Fadil, I would have slid around to his side of the booth and hugged him and leaned my head on his shoulder, and we wouldn’t have needed words, but Freddie wasn’t Fadil, and despite what I might have ima
gined was flirting, she’d made her opinion clear where my feelings for her were concerned.
“Anyway,” Freddie said. “Forget it.”
But I didn’t want to. “Do you think you deserved to be shot? Do you think you didn’t deserve to be healed?”
“I said to forget it!”
“I’m trying to help,” I said. “I wish I had answers, but I don’t.”
“Why don’t you ask the voices in your head? They’ve been super useful so far.”
“You don’t have to be so mean.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“Then why?” I asked. “I get that you’re not into me, but I saved your life. You could at least pretend to be nice.”
“Why bother?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I dug a few bills out of my purse—it was most of what little cash I had—and tossed it on the table. Freddie, however, hadn’t moved.
“Have you ever stopped to consider that this is what your voices wanted to happen? You’re all about how things are connected. How two strangers bumping into each other forever ago can cause a nuclear explosion a hundred years later. I’m thinking you were set up to save me so that you’d learn I wasn’t worth saving. So that you’d understand that none of us are worth saving.”
“That’s a load of crap.” I said, unable to stop myself. “If the voices didn’t want me to help them save the world, they could have let you die.”
Freddie shook her head. “No. You needed to learn the truth about me so that you’d help everyone and not just fucked-up girls you’re in love with.”
“I’m not in love with you!”
“At some point, if you’re really going to rescue humanity, you’ve going to have to save rapists and murderers and Wall Street bankers. So maybe learning that I’m not the person you thought I was is part of that process.”
“Except I don’t think you’re really this person. You want me to think you’re mean, but I don’t believe you actually are.”
Freddie’s face remained emotionless. “Luckily, what you think doesn’t matter.”
“You didn’t find out anything new about David Combs, did you?”
Freddie didn’t say anything. “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think so. Keep on telling yourself what I think doesn’t matter, but you’re the one who called me tonight, not the other way around. And if this is the way you’re going to act, maybe next time you call, I won’t answer.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
I LIKED SEEING Fadil happy. Not that he hadn’t been happy before, but when Naomi was around, his smile seemed permanently etched on his face. That alone was enough to make me ignore her annoying questions.
“Can you fly?” Naomi asked while she picked food out of Fadil’s lunch. Yes, they’d become the couple who ate off of each other’s plates. It was gross, and it took all of my strength not to vomit in my mouth.
“I heal people,” I said. “I can’t fly.”
“But have you tried?”
I waited for Fadil to jump in and shut her down, but he was munching on a carrot stick he’d gotten from Naomi and grinning like the world wasn’t ending. “No, I haven’t tried to fly. I haven’t tried to set things on fire either, but maybe I should.” I squeezed my eyes shut and was sure I looked like I was trying to poop.
“No!” Naomi said. “It’s cool. I don’t need you to set anything on fire.”
“Are you sure?” I peeked one eye open. “It probably wouldn’t be a big fire.”
Fadil finally tagged in to the conversation. “How do you think the healing actually works?” Before I could answer, he said, “I know how you describe it, but I’m talking about the science stuff. Like with Ben Smith. You corrected a genetic defect. Shouldn’t that have changed him?”
“It did,” I said. “It got rid of his cystic fibrosis.”
Naomi was shaking her head before I’d finished. “No, he’s right. If you made changes to someone on the genetic level, it might affect more than the disease.”
“Then maybe I didn’t fix his defective genes,” I said. “Maybe I only fixed the thing that they were doing wrong.”
“What about mental illness?” Naomi asked. “Could you fix that?”
“Should you fix it?” Fadil added.
All I’d wanted to do was enjoy my chick’n nuggets and tell Fadil about my argument with Freddie at the diner, but that was a conversation I didn’t want to have with Naomi around. Plus, I was cranky from lack of sleep. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Not even doctors really understand the causes of mental illnesses,” Naomi said. “My uncle has OCD for real. He’s not one of those people who likes a neat house and says they have OCD. He really has it, and he takes medication for it.”
“Don’t you think he’d rather not have OCD?” I asked.
“Possibly, but if we’re talking about someone’s brain chemistry, wouldn’t changing that change who they are fundamentally? It’s not a broken bone; it’s a brain.”
“It’s a hypothetical at this point,” I said, “since no one’s asked me to heal their OCD.”
Fadil leaned closer to Naomi, and I could tell they were holding hands under the table even though I couldn’t see it. Yuck. “She’s got a point. What about, like, autism? There are those who claim it’s a disease, but we don’t understand it well enough to say that it is. For all we know an autistic person’s brain works in a way we don’t fully understand and it might be an evolutionary advantage.”
These were questions I hadn’t asked myself, but probably should have. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it would depend.”
“On what?” Naomi asked.
“If someone with autism asked me to heal them.” I dipped one of my nuggets into a pool of honey mustard and bit the end off. It was disgusting and I was sure it wasn’t even real chicken. “I’m not running around healing people against their will, but if someone with autism asked me to ‘heal’ them, why would I say no?”
Naomi’s eyes opened wide. “Because there’s nothing wrong with them, that’s why!”
I held up my hands. “Calm down. It’s a hypothetical, unless you know someone with autism who wants me to heal them.”
“I don’t, but—”
“Then it’s pointless to get worked up about it.”
Naomi’s eyes looked like they were going to bulge out of their sockets, but thankfully Javi walked up to our table, casting his shadow over us, before she could say anything else. He wore tight jeans and his baseball jersey even though the season was over.
“What do you want?” I asked, grateful for the interruption.
He dipped his head at Fadil and Naomi. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Javier,” Naomi said. I thought they knew each other, but wasn’t sure how well.
“Javi,” Fadil added.
“Can I talk to you outside?” Javi said.
“I’m kind of busy with eating and building my imaginary world where you and I were never a couple.”
Javi fidgeted with his hands, and when he looked me in the eyes, there was something curious in them. A pleading I’d never seen. “It’s important, Elena.”
I didn’t want to keep arguing with Naomi and Fadil, so I heaved a sigh, gathered my stuff, said bye to Fadil, and followed Javi out of the cafeteria. As soon as we were outside, I said, “What’s so important?”
“I need you to come with me and not ask any questions.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Because that’s not the opening scene to a movie where I end up at the bottom of a pit massaging lotion into my skin.”
He clenched his jaw and the muscles pulsed. “Look, I’ve been thinking over what we talked about on our date—”
“It wasn’t a date.”
“—and how the shit I did to David might have contributed to what set him off. I’m not saying I’m to blame, but it probably didn’t help. And I wish I could, like, go back in time and not be such a dick to him, but I can’t, so I’ve been thinking o
f other non-time-travel ways to make it right.”
I had no idea what Javi was going on about, but I was losing my patience with him. “Get to the point.”
“I got some people together, and I thought you could help them.”
“People who need healing?”
Javi nodded.
“I’m not a rent-a-healer, Javi!”
“I didn’t rent you out.” He took my hand, and it was all I could do not to yank it back. “Just, please? Meet them or whatever, and if you don’t want to do it, then you don’t have to, but talk to them first. That’s all I’m asking.”
I flared my nostrils. “If this is some weird scheme to get me to take you back, it won’t work.”
“It’s not.”
“Then what is it? You think you can balance out being a bully with your dickhole friends by getting me to heal strangers?”
Javi’s chin dipped to his chest and his lower lip puffed out. I knew the look on his face. I’d seen it once when his mother had yelled at him for flunking the second quarter of geometry. This was genuine. It was real. “Kind of,” he said. “I know I can’t undo being an asshole, but I can try to not be one going forward, right?”
I looked into his eyes, searching for some hint of an ulterior motive, but found nothing. Finally, I said, “Take me to them.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
JAVI LED ME to the chorus room, where four students and, surprisingly, a teacher, were waiting. They each sat in a different part of the room, looking like they were trying to pretend that the others weren’t there. I still wasn’t thrilled that Javi had essentially told a bunch of strangers that I would help them without asking me first, but since they were already there, I didn’t feel like I could say no.
“Not her,” I said, pointing at Tori Thrash. She stood with her arms folded over her chest, looking down at me like she was doing me a favor by gracing me with her presence.
“Elena—” Javi said.
“I’ll talk to the others, but I’m not going anywhere near her.”
Javi pulled me to the side and whispered, “I get it, you don’t like her, but hear her out, okay?”