You Could Be Home by Now (13 page)

The thing was, she was learning to drive her mother's '08 Odyssey. The golf cart was maybe one-sixteenth as heavy. And wow, was it ever responsive. Wow, was it ever fast. The whole thing was like one of those problem sets she'd always rocked. If cart
A
moves toward cart
B
at twenty miles per hour, what will happen on impact?

She bit down on a finger to stifle a giggle.

It couldn't have been twenty miles per hour. That was the speed limit for the whole Commons.

Ten at the most. Not that it mattered. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, here she was, fetal by the light of a thousand Pepsi machines.

She shifted. The phone kept jabbing her. She got it out. A couple in robes and mortarboards grinned from the screen. The woman was seriously gorgeous, despite a goofball grin. The guy was a guy. Like Lily had any expertise rating them. One arm snaked proprietarily around the woman's waist. Probably Ben's son and thus genetically predisposed to pursue women who were out of his league.

Fantastic. He had a kid.

The man she'd
put in the hospital
had a kid.

She should drink the hazelnut stuff cooling up above her. She should clear out the hospital's stash of Ho Hos and M&M'S. Morph into a yellow-toothed chunkster, her face a moonscape of zits. It would be fairer that way to the rest of the world. Give people a heads-up they were dealing with someone seriously vile. The coffee tasted bitter and synthetic, and there was an inch of syrupy sludge at the bottom. It scorched her tongue, then her throat. Three hot gulps drained the Styrofoam cup. There were tears in her eyes. She wanted her mom. Of all the crybaby ridiculousness. Mom, who always smelled of sunscreen and Aveda and the cinnamon gum that made it easier for her to avoid sweets.

But—extrapolating from recent data—Mom would get her a therapist or an open-ended ticket to Grandma Gillis in Pennsylvania or find some other way to make her Someone Else's Problem. Option two then. Sierra, since the whole point of having a best friend was being able to call when it turns out you're a USDA prime asshole. Lily gave the phone a vigorous wipe down—it was the per-vet's phone, and the per-vet probably had ear hair—with her shirt. His password—
quelle surprise!
—was 12345.

“Sierra's phone!”

“It's me,” Lily said.

“Lily?”

“Yeah. Me.”

“See you next Tuesday? Real nice.”

“I said I was sorry.”

Sierra sounded a dismissive bleat.

“Something happened,” Lily said.

“Too right something's happened. I only texted you nine-one-one an hour and a half ago.”

“I don't have my phone. Remember?”

“Oops, sorry. How are you even calling?”

Lily drew a steadying breath. “I stole a phone from my grandmother's neighbor after I ran him over with a car.”

“Right.”

“Okay, with a golf cart. He was in one, too.”

Again, the laugh.

“I'm serious. We're at the hospital.”

“Only you. You need a twenty-four/seven camera crew.”

Wouldn't
that
be a catastrophe. “It isn't funny. He might die.” He probably wouldn't, but saying the words made it feel officially possible.

“No one died from a golf cart. It would be like dying of ennui. What's your grandma's address? I can send you some of Christa's Valium.” Christa was Sierra's Spandex stepmom. “Mind you, I'll have to pinch a few for myself to cope with the fallout when she sees they're gone. She's such a pill counter. I think she likes to prove she knows numbers higher than her fingers go.”

“That's mean.”

“That's Christa.”

“It doesn't help me any,” Lily said, mind vibrant with the sharp clarity of crisis. A staggering percentage of their conversations went like this. Tamp somebody down to buoy yourself up, like the world played out on a seesaw. It didn't help any. It didn't change things. It was a ludicrous equation and it didn't come close to balancing.

Sierra said, “You clearly haven't tried her Valium.”

“I need a plan here. I need a real idea.” She wouldn't stand and she wouldn't pace because that was the cheeseball response.

“What happens at Granny's stays at Granny's.”

“Sierra. I'm in real trouble.” Her friend had, to use the Honors English terminology, a distinct tendency toward hyperbole. Sierra's crises were invariably one-eighth as dire as reported. Maybe she thought Lily worked that way too and that, adjusting for social Münchausen's, she was only in the midst of a
fractional
breakdown. “Please,” she said. “Help me think.”

“Okay. Maybe play it like she's going senile? Then you'll get bonus points for being all concerned.”

“She's my gran.”

“Right. You like yours.” Over Christmas break, Sierra couldn't take a bite of pie without her own grandmother lamenting that such a pretty girl was getting an early start on the freshman fifteen. “So get her on your side. Work the subconscious. Maybe try to smell like something she loves. Did your grandpa wear aftershave?”

“I already
do
smell like something she loves. You're insane.”

“I'm trying to help. And I've been thinking about what you said. About a signature perfume?”

“Sorry?”

“On GChat. About capital letters?”

“Oh yeah.” Forever ago. Before the cart, the crunch, the wan hospital light.

“You're onto something. Because everyone knows the sense of smell's the most powerful, right?”

“I guess.” Lily began to breathe through her mouth, so she would smell nothing, so she would not remember this.

“So I was thinking about Rocky.” As usual. Lily almost said it. Caffeine surged vile in her stomach. Sierra said, “I love him.”

“I know.” Lily had to be perfect. She'd promised. From now on. She had to be kind. She made agreeable noises.

Sierra said, “He loves me too, but he won't always.”

Lily's cue to trot out the list: high school couples, real and invented, who'd made it. She'd done it a dozen times. But Lily was in a hospital in Arizona, chemical coffee a riot in her stomach, the man she felled somewhere in the maze of halls. “No,” she agreed. “He won't.”

“Good to know my best friend thinks I'm lovable.”

“You said it first.”

“You weren't supposed to agree with me.”

“This whole conversation is stupid. If you're not going to help—” Me, Lily wanted to say. Me, me, me.

“I'm thinking of using baby lotion. As a moisturizer.”

“What?” The epic randomness brought her short.

“As an investment for the future. Rocky loves me now, but he won't always love me. So ten years from now or something, when he has a baby with someone else, he'll smell the lotion and remember me but he won't know why. And he'll wonder where I am—”

“In a mental institution, that's where.”

“He'll be the one that's crazy. Always daydreaming about me. He won't be able to stop himself. And I'll be young to him forever. Still hot when his wife chubs out.”

By rights Lily should've smelled coffee and industrial bleach. Hospital air, made of too many peoples' breath. She smelled baby lotion, pink and powdery. And she knew: Every time she smelled it now, she'd remember Sierra's stupid plan. How when she was fifteen and careening from one disaster to the next, the best person in her life couldn't be bothered with the worst thing in it.

The phone in her hand did a buzzy chirp.

It occurred to Lily that she was the one who called Sierra most of the time.

And that in a sanity-based universe, ER trauma trumped boyfriend trauma. The phone chirped again.
Per-vet Thales
had someone who cared for him more than Sierra did her. Two people at a bare minimum, considering how solicitous Gran was.

“Lil-lee,” Sierra singsonged, “It's your turn to say something. That's how conversations work.”

“I don't think you actually know how conversations work. I'm in a hospital.” Call waiting continued to announce itself.

“And I'm a hundred thousand miles away. Plus, it's going to take at least ten years for me to get my MD.”

“That doesn't mean it's okay for you to—”

“Twelve years, actually. I'm going to travel after undergrad.”

“Great bedside manner.”

“What am I supposed to say? Give me a script. I'm good with scripts.”

“You're supposed to
know
what to say. And Rocky's wife won't be fat. She'll be pregnant.”

“Yeah, then. But as time passes . . .”

The phone beeped. The caller had left voicemail.

“I still say you're nuts,” Lily said.

“Be nice.” She could
hear
Sierra pout. “I'm having a hard time.”

“
You're
having a hard time?”

“You know you're going to be fine. If you have to, play the I-saved-little-Tyler card.”

“Tyson.” Lily wondered if Sierra had flubbed it on purpose. Right up until the morning of her father's wedding, Sierra kept faux-cidentally calling Spandex Christa
Trista
.

“Tyson, sorry. I guess he's your new best friend.”

“That's low. Come on. What's up?” And
boom!
, she was wheedling. They should admit her to the hospice ward for the terminally pitiful. A man who hadn't shaved in about a year entered the room, nodded at her, and began to feed quarters to the Pepsi machine.

Sierra said, “I saw Rocky with Jennifer Vogler.”

“Rocky
works
with Jennifer Vogler.” It said something lousy about the state of the world that Rocky could get a job and Mona Rosko couldn't. Ms. Rosko might not be nice but she was formidable. Rocky was neither. He carried on like a surfer a thousand miles from either coast. The bearded man disappeared with his purchase.

“I didn't see them at work. They were coming out of that coffee place on Frontenac.”

“Jennifer Vogler has a stupid neck.” Lily's words came automatically and they weren't even true. She couldn't think of anything overtly wrong with Jen, except that she'd destroyed the curve in Honors German. But
neck
was specific enough and random enough to talk Sierra down. Last month, with Alana Patricelli, it had been chin.

“You think?”

“Total duck neck.” Duck neck wasn't even a real thing.

“For real?”

“Quack,” Lily said. “Quack, quack, quack.”

“Quack,” said Sierra.

Lily quacked back. Maybe someone from the psych ward would wander in and take her away.

Sierra said, “It's the third time I've seen them.”

That seesaw: even if each Vogler sighting counted as a discrete problem, how slight that was against the Roskos, and Gran, and the veterinarian she'd left in the waiting room. “Were they, say, behind a counter any of those times? Wearing back vests? Little bow ties?” Rocky and Jen worked concessions at Cineplex 8.

“Yeah.” Sierra laughed. It sounded like her tongue was sputtering through a well of Elmer's Glue. “The bow ties are awful for her poor duck neck. Even worse than the boho beads.”

“The what?”

Lily knew, though.

It was crazycakes that her body did nothing to mark that knowing. No arterial ice, no freakout clatter knees. Only the image: the fall of Sierra's hair against Lily's neck as her friend read over her shoulder. She'd giggled at the cropped photograph and helped with the wording:
I'm worried about your necklace. Points for taking on that whole charm and bauble boho thing, but between you and me and the Internet it looks a little bit Etsy.

Headmistress Brecken had made her take the picture down. There, in her office, in front of witnesses, since Lily was officially a miscreant and Not to Be Trusted.

She didn't even remember what the necklace looked like.

Or really the offensive bra strap.

Or even the Boob Fairy's bountiful gifts.

Only Sierra's glue laugh. The fact that the Boob Fairy was a patented Sierra creation. That Sierra'd said no, Bra-strap Booberkins was way funnier than the other Fixit candidates in Lily's inbox, including Girl Whose Pockets Did Unfortunate Things to Her Butt.

Lily asked again. “Sierra. What boho beads?”

Her best friend covered. “You know. That thing she always wears.”

The main reason Lily hadn't gone all CSI: Forest Park Day to work out the source of the anonymous complaint was that
Sierra
had said the only way to ID her would be to get a good look at her chest and that the school's collected population would freak and cry harassment if Lily started a serious inspection of boobage.

Sierra, whose cartoon drawing of the Boob Fairy had the same kind of side-swept bangs Jen Vogler wore.

Who was more than capable of snapping a picture and submitting it to
Lipstick
via sock puppet.

“Sierra?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you send that Fixit?”

“Why would I send you a Fixit? If there were ever anything
wrong
with me, you'd say.” She sounded helium happy. She sounded like Saturday morning cartoons.

“Yes, I would,” said Lily.

“Hey! You make it sound like there's actually something.”

The per-vet's phone chirped again. “There's a call on the other line,” she said.

“So? It's not even your phone.”

“No. I lost my phone when I posted that thing.”

“That thing?” A guilty catch in Sierra's voice.

“Um.
Lipstick
?”

“You'll get it back. Your phone, too. I'll
help
you. Once you get home. Trust me. And you're probably not even going to need my help. You're
you
.”

The volunteering cemented it. The cheerleading. The fact that it was all about Lily for once. Lily was one hundred and twelve percent sure. Sierra was the backstabbing bimbrain behind the whole mess. “Hey, Sierra?” The idea came beautiful from nowhere.