Any Red-Blooded Girl

  Chapter 19

  I’LL spare you the gory details of my arrest and the dramatic, emotional scene that played out when I was released from jail. Suffice it to say that my parents nixed the hunt for Champ, hired an excellent defense attorney, and encouraged me to rat out Mick’s cousins, which I eventually did after much prodding.

  And lucky for me, I guess, the voodoo lawyer pleaded my case down to a charge of Disorderly Conduct, which is technically a violation in New York, not a crime. And my parents paid the two hundred and fifty dollar fine, pending repayment by me through a sick method of their choosing. Meanwhile, until the whole ugly mess got sorted out, my family and I bunked down at a grungy, rat-infested motel adjacent to a meat processing plant. How stellar.

  Now given the circumstances, you’d probably assume getting arrested was the most disturbing experience in my universe at the moment. But tragically, you’d be wrong. Because instead of obsessing over the consequences of my criminal activity, like the absolute certainty my mother was going to monitor me like an air traffic controller until I turned eighteen, I was wrapped in a bubble of distraught self-pity over losing the love of my life. After all, nothing held any significance—good or bad—in a world without my sweet-hearted, gorgeous Mick Donovan. Even a ground-splitting earthquake or a raging wildfire wouldn’t have fazed me much. I’d given up caring.

  “Hey, Flora. Your bag,” Will said, nudging my arm as we pulled into our driveway back in Punxsutawney.

  Oh boy, now I could wallow in misery somewhere more familiar.

  At the pace of an inchworm, I dragged myself around to the back of the Maroon Monstrosity, where I attempted to sling my duffel over my shoulder. Instead, though, I just ended up scuffing the thing along behind me limp-armed in the dirt.

  I guess you could say the Valium my mother had slipped me was still in effect, because I felt about as flat as humanly possible—unless, of course, you counted psychopaths. At least I was still more in touch with my feelings than they were.

  “Are you okay, honey?” my mother asked, as I hiked the stairs to my bedroom in a foggy daze. “Can I get you anything?”

  Instead of considering me a criminal, like the courts had, or a victim, like my father had, my mother had simply decided I’d lost my mind. And that’s how she was treating me: like I was such a fragile, unpredictable mess she’d better tiptoe around in my presence. And even though I probably should have been offended by the insinuation I was an incurable mental case, somehow I figured it was better than the alternatives. I mean, at least if she thought I was crazy, she’d probably leave me alone.

  “Nope. All set,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

  “Um…uh…okay,” she stumbled. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  I just nodded.

  Still dazed, I wandered into my room, dropped my bag on the floor, and collapsed on my unmade bed. It was almost nightfall, but I didn’t bother turning on any lights. Because honestly, the mere thought of returning to my old life like nothing had happened, like I hadn’t suffered an immeasurable loss, was just too sad to bear. All I wanted to do was linger in the warm, happy memories of Mick. So I pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes, determined to fall asleep—for one last night, at least—knowing I was the center of Mick’s universe and he was madly, deeply, unyieldingly in love with me.

  I’m pretty sure it was because of the Valium, but I got an amazingly solid first night’s sleep back in Punxsutawney. So solid, in fact, I didn’t even wake up until after everyone else had eaten lunch.

  And on the first day of my new life, reality was already starting to set in. Because as much as I wanted to continue ignoring the truth, Mick was gone; he wasn’t coming back. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I could wish and hope and dream all I wanted, but it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Mick Donovan was nothing more than a stranger to me now. A stranger without even an address or a phone number. A ghost.

  Without warning, my bedroom door creaked open. “Hey, Flowbee,” my dad said, all upbeat. “Want something to eat?”

  “Nah,” I mumbled. Whatever he’d cooked smelled pretty good, but my appetite was nonexistent.

  He frowned. “Well, if you get hungry, let me know. Oh, and Jessie called. I told her you’d call her when you got up.”

  Since when were my parents intervening in my social life? I guess they were even more worried about me than I’d realized. “Uh-huh,” I agreed half-heartedly. “I’ll call her later.”

  But the funny thing was, I had absolutely no desire to talk to Jessie. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s great and everything. But she could never really understand how hard I’d fallen for Mick, which meant she’d probably try to cheer me up. And I didn’t want to be cheery. I wanted to be as miserable as I’d been happy with Mick. It was the only way I’d know for sure our love was real. Because if there was even a shred of a chance I could just snap my fingers and get over him…well, then our relationship wasn’t what I’d thought it was to begin with.

  For another few seconds, my dad lingered in the doorway staring at me before he finally left. And that’s when I noticed just how unfamiliar my room had become. How it didn’t seem to fit me anymore. How it seemed like it belonged to someone else. And the longer I sat there, the more uncomfortable I became. So even though I didn’t want to talk about Mick, I decided to walk over to Jessie’s and see how her trip to Europe had panned out after all.

  “Oh my God! Come in! Come in!” Jessie yelped, as I moped through her front door. She threw her arms around me and squeezed. But when I didn’t squeeze back, she didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve been calling you for like two days,” she complained.

  We pulled our regular stools out from the kitchen counter. “I was on that lame camping trip with my parents, so…” I started to say.

  “Ugh. I know,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes. “Tell me all about it.”

  I was sure she didn’t mean it literally. “How was Europe?” I deflected. “I wish I could’ve gone.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “I mean, it should’ve been fun, but just about everything went wrong. You’re lucky your parents went all Nazi on you.”

  “What do you mean everything went wrong?” I asked, trying to act interested when all I could think about was Mick.

  She sighed. “Well, let’s see… First my dad threw his back out and we had to spend like a month in the hospital in Paris.”

  “That sucks,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, for him. He spent the rest of the trip all drugged-out and hunched over,” she said, chuckling at her father’s misfortune as she passed me a chubby pretzel rod that resembled a cigar.

  I still wasn’t hungry, but what the hell. It couldn’t hurt to suck all the chunky salt crystals off the thing until it was naked and soggy.

  “So promise you won’t think I’m a total freakazoid…” Jessie said, like I was supposed to know what the hell she was talking about.

  I took the pretzel out of my mouth. “Huh?”

  “I wouldn’t tell this to anyone but you, I swear. But I caught some weird virus, and my parents barely let me out of the hotel. It was a disaster,” she said, pausing for my reaction.

  “What kind of virus?” I asked. Maybe if she gave it to me, I could just die already and get it over with.

  “I don’t know. It had some freaky name like Parvo-something,” she said. “Do you think it’s French?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Sounds French to me,” she said. “Anyway, first I thought I just had a cold—like a runny nose and a sore throat and stuff.” She stuck out her tongue in disgust. “But then I got this crazy red rash all over my face. It was hideous.”

  I stared, but there was nothing visibly wrong with her. “I don’t see anything,” I remarked.

  “Oh, it’s gone. It only lasted like a week or so,” she explained. “All better. But of course my parents treated me like I had the Bubonic Plague, so I m
issed Big Ben, Madame Tussaud’s, Buckingham Palace…”

  “London?” I asked, confused. “I thought you said you got sick in France.”

  She shook her head. “No, not really. I probably caught it in France. In the hospital. At least that’s what my mother thinks. But I didn’t actually get sick until we got to London.”

  “Bummer,” I said, trying to work up the appropriate amount of concern in my voice. I must admit, though, I’m a pretty bad actress. If Jessie didn’t catch on to the fact that I was severely depressed, she wasn’t paying much attention.

  “So basically Europe was a bust,” she continued without missing a beat. “Ridiculous.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “What about you? Did you have fun in… Where was it again?”

  “It was supposed to be Lake Champlain,” I said, “but we never actually made it there.” I was toying with the idea of telling her the whole sordid story, but I stopped at, “There was a problem, and we had to come home.”

  “Like what? A dental emergency?” Jessie joked.

  It would’ve been just like the Mental Hygienist to drag us back to Punxsutawney so she could assist in some gory dental procedure. “No, nothing like that—believe it or not,” I said. “Just something that screwed everything up, that’s all. I’ll tell you about it later. Promise.”

  “Uh…okay.”

  Obviously, Jessie was stuck for words. And I couldn’t blame her. I mean, in our whole friendship, I’d never intentionally kept anything from her—until now. And it wasn’t like I didn’t want her to know about Mick; it was just too soon. I’m sure if the shoe had been on the other foot, I wouldn’t have known how to react either.

  I broke the ice with a change of subject. “Five more weeks ’til school,” I said. “What’s the plan for the rest of the summer?”

  With a grin, Jessie said, “Chillaxing, of course. And vegetating. Or maybe vegetating and chillaxing,” she mused. “I haven’t decided.”

  There it was, the reason Jessie Haskell was my best friend on earth: Even at the worst of times, she could pick me up just by being herself.

  “Sounds perfect,” I agreed, feeling the tiniest shred of true excitement. “Count me in.”

  After all, the only thing that could’ve trumped chillaxing and vegetating with Jessie was breathing the air my sweet, gentle Mick had just exhaled. But as much as it killed me to admit it, the possibility of that happening ever again was near zero. Near zero, but not absolute zero. A trivial difference, I know, but one that gave me a reason to go on. A convoluted reason, maybe, but a reason just the same.