“So are they ever violent?” I try to imagine the guy hitting Kayla with a rock.
“Sometimes. Sometimes they’re just confused.” Drew sucks in his breath like he’s going to say something more, but then he’s quiet for a long time. Finally, in a rush he says, “Do you want to know the truth, Gabie?” There’s an edge of anger to his voice. “Do you really want to know the truth?”
Suddenly I’m not all that sure that I do. “Tell me,” I say.
But Drew’s silent, like he’s rethinking it. Then he says softly, “My life isn’t like yours, okay?”
Is Drew saying he uses meth? I know he sells pot, but I feel sick thinking there’s more to it than that. My parents are always complaining about the drug users they see in the hospital. They get in horrible, stupid accidents or walk away from accidents they caused that leave other people in wheelchairs. And they steal everything.
“What do you mean?” My hands tighten on the wheel.
“I don’t live in the perfect house, and I don’t have the perfect parents with the perfect matching Beemers. My life isn’t anything like that.”
I flush. He’s making fun of me. Then I realize Drew’s not focused on me. He’s focused on himself.
“I know some people think I’m white trash,” he continues. “You know what? It’s true. My clothes are old. I live in a crappy apartment. I’m lucky if I get Cs. I’m not in the AP classes, that’s for sure. And my parents are certainly not doctors.” He lifts his chin. “I already told you that I don’t know who my dad is. My mom, well, my mom has her own problems. It’s not just my mom’s friends who are tweakers.” His voice is so soft it’s hard to hear it. “Up until six months ago, my mom was working at Thriftway. You know, as a checker. Green apron, white name tag, and her feet always hurt. It wasn’t a great job, but she never graduated high school, so it was pretty good. But then she met this guy, this customer. Named Gary. And Gary started making a point of coming through her register. And she was all flattered.” He blows air out through his lips. “So then he asked her out. But when she came home that night, I could tell something was wrong. She was talking a mile a minute. And she never went to bed.” His eyes flash over to mine.
“So it was meth?” I can’t imagine my parents using. Their bodies are temples. Everything that goes inside them is weighed and measured and full of nutrients.
“I started finding rolled-up dollar bills around. And little mirrors with residue on them. A few months ago I found a tiny Baggie full of powder in the kitchen drawer.”
“What did you do?” Pulling up in front of my house, I shut off the car, then turned to face Drew.
“I flushed it.” He bites his lip.
“And then what happened?”
“She went ballistic. I wasn’t thinking of where she got the money to buy it. Although where else was she going to get it? The first time her till didn’t balance, her boss believed her when she said she had rung something up wrong. The second time, he put her on probation. The third time, he fired her. My mom used to be smart, not just street-smart, but book-smart. She had to drop out of high school when she had me, but she still liked to do crossword puzzles and stuff like that. She read a lot. But now the things she says and does don’t make any sense. She liked it at first because she lost weight. Now she’s so scrawny. Her arms and legs are like twigs.” His voice sinks to a whisper. “I feel like I’m watching her die.”
“What can you do?”
“I called a hotline last week. They said there wasn’t much I could do until she was willing to change.” His voice roughens. “She’s living on Michelob Light and these cream curl honey buns. And since they banned her from Thriftway, she makes me go in to buy them. Everyone knows me. I practically grew up there. Do you know how hard that is? They either make a point of saying something to me or a point of looking away. Or they watch me. Like I’m a thief, too.”
A lightbulb goes on. If his mom’s not working, how do they live? “So that’s why you want to work so many hours.”
He doesn’t answer, just gets out of the car. We walk up to the front door together.
I unlock the door, and the alarm starts to beep. I hurry inside and punch in the code. When I turn back, Drew is still standing in the doorway. The light above the door makes his eyes pools of shadows.
“Can you stay until I make sure no one else is here?”
He doesn’t answer, just takes a step inside the door and closes it.
After I text my parents to let them know I’m okay, Drew follows me as I walk through the rooms. In each room I leave the lights on until every single one is blazing. I’ll turn them off before I go to school, and my parents will never know.
“My parents have some Kahlua,” I say. “It was a Christmas gift. They never drink it.” For once, I don’t want to think too hard about what I’m saying or doing.
Drew nods, but I can’t read his expression. “Kahlua and cream. I’ve had that before. It’s good. Especially if you don’t like the taste of alcohol.”
“Do you think we could mix it with skim milk? Because that’s all that’s in the fridge. Unless you want to try Kahlua and cottage cheese?” I feel giddy. Maybe I’m finally stepping over the line.
“I don’t think I want any, either way.”
His words knock me off balance, but I try not to show it. “Do you mind if I have some?”
He shrugs. “Be my guest.”
I find the bottle in the bottom cabinet. Even hidden away, it’s gotten dusty. The shape of it, with raised smooth edges circling the top and bottom, feels good to my fingers. I break the seal, pour some into a glass, and then add milk. I take a sip. It’s like milk mixed with coffee—with a heaviness underneath.
I walk into the living room, and he follows me. We sit down on the couch. There’s two feet between us. I want to narrow the distance.
“Um, I’m sorry if I acted funny about you knowing that word. Cerulean.” I kind of mumble it, afraid I’ll accidentally cut him the way I did two days ago. “I didn’t even know how to pronounce it for sure until you said it.”
Drew’s pale eyes meet mine. “Final Fantasy Seven.”
“What?”
He lifts one shoulder and gives me a lopsided smile. “It’s a Play Station game. Like a shooting game. And one character is this blue-haired guy named Azul the Cerulean.”
“Azul—is that like azure? So it’s Blue the Blue?”
He shrugs. “I looked up cerulean online. That’s why I know what it means. Except, did you know it could be used for all different kinds of blue—sky blue, dark blue, greenish blue? Nobody really agrees on what color it is.”
“Sometimes it seems like nobody agrees on anything. Like everyone else seems to think that Kayla is dead.” I take another sip.
Drew leans forward. Now there’s less than a foot between our faces. Our voices are hushed, even though there’s no one to hear us. “Okay, you’re the one who keeps saying you know Kayla is alive. Do you still know that?”
I close my eyes and think of her. There’s that same little pulse that’s been there since she went missing. The same pulse that flares up if I tell myself she’s dead. But something’s different.
“Yes.” I open my eyes. “But not as strong as before. It’s like it’s…muted. Maybe it’s just so hard to think of her dead. I mean, Kayla’s always so full of life. I’m like a ghost compared to her. Everyone knows her, everyone likes her—the teachers, the kids at school, the customers. If that guy had taken me, do you think there would be piles of flowers outside my locker? Do you think people would have to go see the counselor?” Tears film my eyes. I try hard to blink them away, but one escapes and runs down my cheek.
Drew leans forward and touches it. I barely feel his fingertip. Or maybe it’s just that my cheeks feel numb. The most I’ve had to drink before was a sip of my mom’s wine at dinner.
I let out a shaky breath. “When I work with Kayla, it’s like I’m not even there. No one sees me.”
“I
see you,” Drew says. And then there’s no more space between us.
The Seventh Day
Drew
YOU’VE HEARD of a contact high? I could get a contact drunk kissing Gabie. The Kahlua makes her mouth sweet and loose. After a while, I don’t know where she begins and I end. We’re alone in her house, no parents, no anybody, and the world is asleep around us. She scoots back until she’s lying full length on the couch and I’m on top of her, and for a long time, we don’t say anything.
At least not with words.
Finally, I lever myself up on one elbow. “What if your parents come home?”
She shakes her head. “They won’t.” Her mouth and eyes widen. “Won’t. That’s a funny word, isn’t it? Won’t, won’t, won’t.” It sounds like a honk, like a lonely bird’s cry as it flies away.
It’s pretty clear Gabie is drunk off her butt. She gives me a crooked grin, closes her eyes, and starts kissing me again. Her hands slide up under my shirt and urge it off. And then she takes off her own shirt so she’s only wearing her bra, which is white with little red polka dots and a tiny red satin bow in the center. Her skin is smooth and feels so good.
It’s pretty clear I can do whatever I want and Gabie won’t do anything but say yes.
But something stops me. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve never done it before. I don’t know if it’s because I’m 99.9 percent sure that Gabie’s never done it before. I don’t know if it’s because she keeps picking up her glass of Kahlua to sip from it, and the more she sips, the more her eyes roll back in her head. All I know is that no matter how much I want Gabie, I want to be able to talk to her tomorrow.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go up to your room.”
“That’s a good idea! That’s a very good idea.” She winks at me, or tries to, but just ends up blinking both eyes.
I have to keep my arm around Gabie as we go up the stairs, or she would fall back and crack her head. Which reminds me of Kayla. Kayla and the bloody rock and the icy river rushing along.
LUCKILY GABIE lives up in the hills, so the way home is all downhill on my longboard. It’s so early there’s nobody out, and the light is as soft as Gabie’s lips when I kissed her good-bye. She barely stirred. I managed to get her shirt back on her. It was like wrestling with a giant rag doll. Before I left, I put away the Kahlua and rinsed out the glass. The last thing I did was hit the button to set the alarm.
At the sound of my key in the apartment door, Mom jerks her body around.
“It’s only me,” I say, and she goes back to work.
She’s kneeling, surrounded by a bunch of her plastic tubs, all of them open. The floor is covered with kids’ drawings and jewelry and comic books and collectible figurines. There are heaps of stuffed animals, power tools, and clothes that would have been six sizes too big for her even before she started using. She’s organizing it all, but her idea of what goes in what tub and what doesn’t is only clear to her. And there seems to be even more stuff than there used to be.
“Mom! You said you weren’t going to bring anything else back here.”
“I’m just sorting it,” she says with her lower lip pushed out, like I’ve hurt her feelings. “That’s all.”
She’ll probably be up for the next two days “organizing” her stuff. And it’s not hers, anyway.
My mom has become a thief.
The reason they call them tweakers is because meth makes you obsess on something. At first when Mom was high, she had to be on the computer twenty-four hours a day. She was always fiddling with programs to make it run faster. Only, half the time the computer ended up not working at all.
Then she started ordering freebies from the Internet. We were getting junk in the mail every day—a Book of Mormon, a Wisconsin cheese poster, a meditation DVD. But by the time stuff actually came, she didn’t care. It just lay around in piles on the dining room table, and then when that got filled up, in piles on the floor.
Then it was like free Internet stuff wasn’t important anymore, and she started looking in the trash bins behind stores. Dumpster diving for pens behind Office Depot. Perfectly good lamps with the sale sticker still attached and the plug cut off, but she said Gary was handy and could fix them.
And somewhere along the line, she turned into a thief. It took me a while to figure that out. She told me she was going to yard sales, but I think she was really breaking into people’s houses. Once I found a garbage bag filled with IDs: driver’s licenses, credit cards, even library cards. I don’t think she did anything with them. If she found money, she gave it to Gary, but the rest she just kept.
She started keeping everything in plastic tubs. The living room got full, and so did the dining room and her bedroom. She even put some in my room. I told her she had to find someplace else. So she rented a storage locker with some of the money she “found.”
Only she came back from the storage locker with even more useless crap. It turned out the storage spaces have open tops. Mom’s never been afraid of heights. When I was a kid, she would climb trees higher than I could. And she weighs less than a hundred pounds now. So I guess she just piles her storage boxes to make steps and scrambles like a spider from unit to unit. To her juiced mind, the fact that all this stuff is in storage means it doesn’t belong to anyone.
The thing is, she never uses any of it. All she does is organize it. That’s her word. She just shifts things around from one box to another. Sometimes she even takes back things to the storage spaces that she doesn’t “need.”
Like she needs any of it.
To get to my room, I have to step over pile after pile, sometimes teetering on tiptoe. Mom doesn’t even glance up, sorting and muttering to herself, scratching and scratching at her skin because she says it feels like there are bugs under there.
This can’t be what Mom wanted. But it’s where she ended up.
Can you really change your destiny?
The Eighth Day
Kayla
HOW LONG can he keep me here?
Will I ever see the sun again? Will I die here?
Is there going to come a point when I want to die?
Will they find my body, years from now, and wonder who I am? That thought is the worst, that I might become some nameless dead girl, a stranger’s pile of bones. I finger the label on an empty water bottle. I could write on the back, and leave it in my pocket so people will know who I am. Only I don’t have anything to write with.
What does he want from me? He hasn’t touched me, if you don’t count the time he hit me and threw me on the bed.
But I think it’s only the cut on my head that’s stopped him from doing anything more. That and me throwing up. If he has some crazy fantasy about master and slave, it probably doesn’t involve a vomiting slave girl with an open cut on her head. One who smells like old sweat and pee.
I don’t like to sleep, don’t like to be vulnerable. Since there’s nothing else to do, I’ve been watching the DVDs he left lined up next to the TV. Sex and the City is out because I don’t want to give him any ideas. The Office isn’t appealing because I can’t ever imagine laughing in this room. So far I’ve watched the first season of 24. It’s one of the few ways I have of telling time. Every hour of 24 really lasts forty-one minutes, which is kind of crazy but makes as much sense as anything else does here.
Forty-one minutes times twenty-four episodes means I have to have been in here more than a day. I think it’s been a lot more. I don’t know how long I was asleep or unconscious before I woke up.
I’ve tried to figure out whether it’s day or night. If I could just have that. Whenever he opens the door, there’s only darkness on the other side. Maybe a stretch of cement floor where the light washes out, and maybe the shadow of a wall before he closes the door, but there’s no clue where we are, no clue what time it is. And when he leaves, the door seals so tight I can’t even hear his footsteps moving away.
What if—and this really makes my skin crawl—he has a tiny camera wat
ching me? Watching me sleep. Watching me talk to myself. Just in case, I turn off the light before I use the toilet.
There’s no obvious camera like at a bank where you might look up in a corner and see a black box with a lens. But I’ve heard about miniature cameras a pervy guy could hide behind a tiny hole. I inspect every inch of the smooth white walls, even climb on top of the bed and look at the ceiling. I do it with the light off, too, in case anything glows and gives it away.
I find nothing.
And the meals he brings could be any meal. Last time it was a roll and an orange and two more slices of that orange processed cheese. Thinking of food makes me wonder if I could ask him for something you’d have to eat with a knife. Like a steak. And then I could sink the steak knife into his chest.
The horrible thing is that I can imagine exactly how it would feel. The “pop” as the skin stopped resisting and parted. How hard I’d have to push to get to his heart. But I would do it.
I would.
I try to remember what they taught us in the Women’s Strength class my mom dragged me and Maya to four years ago. I’m sorry now that I giggled through it. It wasn’t that it was funny; we were nervous. We were thirteen years old, and they wanted us to yell at this female instructor who was older than our moms, scream at her to back off, with our faces all contorted and fierce. Later she made us lie down on the floor. Then she straddled us and held our shoulders down and we were supposed to buck her off.
I failed at that, too.
I don’t know if this guy is trying to give me ideas, but I wish I had a gun like every character on 24. Or at least knew karate. If Jack Bauer were down here, he would figure out how to knock this guy unconscious with a couple of well-placed kicks and a head butt, escape from this room, hotwire a car in twenty seconds, and somehow save the world in the process.