Authors: Rachel Vail
“Sounds great,” I said, and turned around to clean the already gleaming machines with my rag while my friends ordered their overly sweet drinks from Toby.
They took their drinks to go. I waved good-bye and even mustered a smile. Kevin was first to walk out and didn’t hold the door for anybody. Brad at least turned around and said, “See you back at the ranch!”
Felicity giggled at that and so, therefore, did Paige.
When the door closed behind them, I wilted onto the stool behind the counter, even though Toby was the senior person on and had rights to it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You must do improv,” he answered.
“Why?” I asked instead of admitting that no, I never did anything of the kind.
“You’re good at it. The rule.”
“The rule?”
“‘Yes, and.’ Whatever your scene partner says, you say yes, and then add … You’re yanking my chain, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, and …”
“And?”
“And I … am secretly an improv pro. You know, in the greater Boston area.”
“You don’t get out to Chicago much these days?”
I’d never been to Chicago. “Chicago is so done now.”
“True that,” he said. “And.”
“And.”
“And it sucks when you have to see your ex with somebody else the first time.”
“Yes,” I said. “And—it does. And that really helped. And it was fun.”
He nodded. “’Twas. Your turn to clean the milk station.”
“On it,” I said. I made it gleam. Felt good to scrub something clean.
DESPITE MY EFFORTS
to avoid her, Felicity continued being very friendly to me all week at school. She asked me a bit about Toby, and the band we were going to see, and about working at Cuppa. She was being so nice it was hard to avoid falling into a happy friendship with her. But as soon as I felt myself sucked into a conversation, walking down the hall with her or sitting together at lunch, I’d picture her behind that hemlock in her backyard with Kevin’s hand tangled in her hair, and my mind would clamp as tight as my jaw.
At those moments, she’d tilt her head a bit, confused, and let it go, wandering off with Paige or one of her other adorable friends. It wasn’t fair, I realized—she had no idea I was involved with Kevin when she got hair-tangled in it, and of course I had to keep it that way. She couldn’t know. And I of all people had a heck of a nerve being mad at anybody for kissing Kevin while I was (secretly, unofficially) going out with him, after what I had done to Tess knowing full well that she was publicly, officially falling in love with him at the time.
Urgh.
Sometimes it was hard to be friends with myself.
And then, of course, Tess started asking me about Toby. We were getting to be the talk of the school: me and that cool senior, going to see an awesome band Saturday night in Harvard Square. Tess thought I was being humble, saying
I don’t know
and
We’re just friends from work
.
The fact that Felicity and Tess seemed impressed and Kevin seemed pissed off meant more to me than I wanted to admit. Exactly when I felt least likable, I was hitting my popularity zenith.
Friday afternoon, Tess came over so we could work on our science projects together. We stopped off in town and bought gummies for me and water for her, since she was doing taste tests of bottled water, to see how they ranked on a scale from one to ten. Neither of us were likely to win Nobels, it was clear to us both.
We were in my kitchen dropping gummi bears, counting, and cracking up when Kevin came in from baseball practice.
“Hi, Kevin!” Tess said, turning on her full wattage.
What?
Since when was she so friendly to Kevin?
“Will you taste-test these waters?” she asked him.
“Okay,” he said. He put down his mitt and sat on the bench his father had placed beside our back doorway. He took off his sneakers while Tess poured a little water from each bottle into a separate cup, then lined up all ten plastic cups beside numbered index cards across the kitchen table, whispering to me the whole time about what I should write down on her pad.
Kevin came to the table and crossed his arms over his chest, wary of her and of the activity, looking down at the plastic cups as if maybe she had put poison in some of them. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Choose one, drink it, and say how much you like it.”
He picked up cup number five and drank it like a shot.
“So?”
“It’s fine.”
“On a scale of one to ten.”
“It’s water,” he said.
“Just give it a rating,” Tess said. “It’s my science project. Come on.”
“Maybe taste another and compare them,” I suggested.
He chugged cup number one. “It’s water, too.”
“They’re all water,” Tess said. “But don’t they taste subtly different?”
“No,” Kevin said.
“Are you taste-blind, too?”
“Too?”
“Yeah,” Tess said. “Color-blind
and
taste-blind?”
He looked at me then, first time all day.
“I didn’t …” There was nothing I could say. Obviously I had told Tess he was color-blind. “You didn’t say it was a secret.”
He grabbed on to the edge of the table. I stepped back, involuntarily, picturing him flipping over the table and dumping everything.
“We’re best friends, Kevin,” Tess said. “Charlie tells me everything! Your rocket ship underpants, how you fart if you eat cheese—”
I jumped in: “I never—”
“Just like you told Brad about how Charlie eats cookies in the middle of the night. What do you expect?”
My mouth dropped open. “You told Brad?”
“I didn’t,” Kevin said.
“I knew it. I can’t believe you.”
“Me?”
“Would you guys calm down?” Tess laughed. “Come on, Kevin. Just rate the stupid waters so I don’t fail science?”
So Kevin sipped each cup of water and rated them. I think he chose random numbers, which I wrote down in Tess’s notebook. Then he went upstairs, and Tess and I hung out until it was time for her to go home.
“I see what you mean,” she said. “It’s, like, tense in your house now. It always used to be so chill here. So, you’re really going to Harvard Square with that guy Toby tomorrow night?”
“That’s what he said,” I didn’t lie.
“Well, text me if you need me,” she said, buckling her helmet under her chin. “You know, if you suddenly get that
gotta go
feeling.”
“I will, thanks.” I sat down on my back step. “Hey, Tess?”
“Yeah?” She was already straddling her bike, ready to go.
“From now on, don’t, if I tell you something about Kevin, don’t …”
“You both need to lighten up.” She blew me a kiss and flew down the hill on her bike, her long hair streaming out behind her.
I LET HALF
an hour pass after the parents left for dinner with their friends before I went to look for Samantha. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room, so I pulled myself up the stairs, yanking on the banister. Kevin’s door was half-open, but I didn’t see him in there. Samantha was on her bed with her eyes closed and a huge, heavy book open on her stomach.
“Hey, Sam,” I said. “You okay?”
“Just resting.”
“Okay,” I said. “You want to teach me how to blow those bubbles?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Sorry I couldn’t rally last night.”
“That’s okay,” she whispered.
I leaned against the door frame and watched her pretty face relax little by little, her eyelashes resting on her pale cheeks.
It was nice.
I could have stayed there for hours—maybe I should have, in hindsight. But instead I turned around and saw that Kevin was standing in the hallway outside Samantha’s room, staring at me with those intense, half-closed eyes that are my kryptonite.
I stepped around him and was on my way to my room when he asked, “You really going out with that pothead?”
I turned around, in front of his open door, to face him. “He’s not a pothead, and none of your business,” I said. “You really going out with that airhead?”
“I thought she’s one of your crew,” Kevin said, stepping toward me. “Don’t you people tell each other everything?”
“I think you got me mixed up with you,” I snarled back, not letting myself enjoy the fact that Kevin hadn’t denied that his girlfriend or hookup or whatever, Felicity, was an airhead. “How much did you tell Brad about us?”
“I’m not the one who—”
“If you guys are going to fight,” Samantha called from inside her dark room, “could you do it downstairs? I’m trying to fall asleep.”
“We’re done,” Kevin called back to her. “Let’s not …”
“Absolutely,” I agreed, crossing my arms over my chest. “Let’s not.”
“So … can I get into my room?”
“Your room.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Look, I didn’t ask to move in here. You don’t want me here. But here I am. Right? And I have no frigging out. I have no place I can go to not be here. Or I’d go in a heartbeat. You don’t like my shampoo? Well, sorry it’s not up to your standards, but honestly? Screw you. I don’t want any part of the stupid little dramas you and your friends cook up to torture one another. You want to hook up with every skeezy guy in school, even if he’s way too old for you, which he is, by the way? Good. Fine, whatever. Do it. Why should I care? I don’t care what you do, or what your conniving friend Tess thinks I did, or your mother’s feelings about goddamn hammocks, or my father’s stupid rules, or my deadbeat mom’s sorry-ass excuses, or the frigging cleanliness of the freaking bathroom! So, for now, yeah. My room. Because I have no damn choice. So how about you take two steps to the side and leave me the hell alone.”
“I hate you!” I yelled.
“Right back at you.”
“Sam,” I said, seeing her emerge at a slant from her room, just the top half of her angling out, disheveled and squinting.
“I …” Her eyes were mostly closed.
“Sorry,” I told her. “We’re done. We were just—everything’s okay. Go back to bed. Sam? You okay?”
She was sort of slumping down against her door frame.
“Sam?” I asked, stepping toward her.
“I don’t feel so … ,” she mumbled.
And then she hit the floor in a heap.
SAMANTHA WAS BLUISH-WHITE
and limp, a tiny rag doll there on the floor. I took her head onto my lap. She was breathing, but not very much.
“Kevin!”
He was standing above us in a flash. Then he sank down beside us, bluish too, like it was contagious.
“Call nine-one-one,” I said.
“I don’t, I can’t—”
“Now, Kevin,” I said. “My phone is right there, by your foot. Grab my phone and call nine-one-one.”
“Maybe I should call my mom,” he said. “Is she … what happened? What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. Kevin, nine-one-one.”
“I didn’t, if anything …”
I didn’t want to bobble Samantha’s head, but Kevin was useless, muttering to himself, his head between his knees. I slipped one hand under Samantha’s head and reached past Kevin to grab my phone. I pressed the buttons I had never called before, because you never call 911 unless it’s a real emergency, or you could get in big trouble or distract them from the real emergencies.
Kevin, meanwhile, was saying, “We better call—I have to call my dad—call my dad first because, if, he’s gonna be so mad, so … at me, if we …”
I stopped listening to him because the operator had picked up.
“I have an emergency,” I told her, thinking,
No kidding. Thought you called 911 because you wanted to order a pizza.
“I need an ambulance because there is a nine-year-old who just passed out and she is, she looks like she might be, um, dying.”
There’s a joke Tess told me last year. Two hunters in the woods, one collapses, the other calls 911 and says, “I’m hunting in the woods with my buddy, and I think he’s dead; help!” The operator asks, “Are you sure he’s dead?” The hunter says, “Hold on a sec.” There’s a gunshot, and then the hunter gets back on the phone and says, “Okay, now he’s definitely dead. Now what?”
I was answering questions and following directions: giving the 911 lady my address, checking in Sam’s mouth to make sure she wasn’t choking on anything. I had my finger digging around Sam’s wet mouth, but everything was happening in slow enough slow motion to let me have that stupid middle-school joke running through my head at the same time, and berating myself for it on a separate track. My voice, answering the operator, sounded far away and like Mom’s—calm, capable, in control:
No, I don’t think she ingested any poison, drugs, or alcohol; yes, in fact, she did seem a little ill earlier in the day. Yes, she is still breathing. Yes, I can feel a pulse in her neck, but I don’t know how strong a pulse is actually supposed to feel.