Equilibrium (17 page)

Darcy had thought she was so cool, open to anything, but the unkind edge to her voice spoke of something else. “Did you add Amy to your list?”

“No, I started a new list.” Heather sounded just as mean, maybe meaner. “What do you care? You have Nick. You don’t need to fix me up with boys anymore so we can go to dances together.”

“Fix you up? Boys always wanted to go out with you. And we always had so much fun,” Darcy said, and the past tense stung.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I was crying when Nick asked you to the prom. I knew I couldn’t fake it anymore and go out with another boy. I actually saw a big neon sign in my head: Game over.”

Heather couldn’t fake it anymore. Back in fifth grade, the three of them had vowed honesty—she, Heather, and Cam. Darcy had swiped alcohol and sewing needles from her house, and they’d taken turns pricking each other’s forefingers. They’d stood in the shaded woods and pressed their fingers together until the blood ran together.
Blood brother and sisters. Forever.

Giving her left-hand ring finger a good hard stare, Darcy could still make out the tiny point of raised skin, the evidence of their shared tattoo. “I just don’t think you’re gay. Maybe you’re just experimenting? Maybe this is, like, that phase where you’d only kiss redheads?”

Heather smirked. “Ever notice there aren’t many boys with red hair?”

“What if next week you change your mind and decide you’re straight again?”

Heather stood up. “So now you’re saying I’m too stupid to figure out if I’m gay or straight?”

“I never said you were stupid, Heath, it’s just—”

“Why is everything
you
do okay? Like, you can go out with a delinquent, but I can’t have something real? You can’t even stand the possibility this has nothing to do with you. It’s not about you, okay? It’s about me.”

“Did you just call Nick a delinquent?”

Heather’s jaw dropped, releasing a huff. “I don’t believe you! To think I defend you when people talk about you behind your back, tell them how nice you really are, even though you treat me like dirt whenever you have a boyfriend.” Heather narrowed her gaze, and her arms trembled even after she’d crossed them. “Now you’re blowing me off for a drug dealer, a kid you don’t even know.”

“I do know him!” All at once, Darcy was trembling, too, her body working hard while her mind tried to figure how to best express Nick to Heather, without betraying Nick’s family history. She spoke extra softly, so her voice wouldn’t crack. “Nick gets what I’ve gone through, what I went through with my dad.”

“Like I don’t! Who did you call whenever your dad was sick? Huh? Who stayed over all week after he—after he died, even slept in the same bed with you, so you wouldn’t get scared?”

“You’re not going to tell anyone about that, are you?”

“This is not about you! It’s about me, what I’m going through, right here, right now.” Heather unfolded her arms and dropped her hands to her sides, so Darcy could see the full extent of their tremors. “I’m scared, and you won’t even look at me.”

True enough; Darcy was staring at Heather’s hands. Darcy pulled focus and worked her gaze back to her friend’s paler than usual complexion, her quivering lower lip, and her moist eyes. The back of Darcy’s head tingled as she saw herself from Heather’s point of view: selfish.

What did Heather want from She of the Crazy House? Darcy had always thought Heather was her soul sister, that she loved her as if they were truly related, even before they’d performed the blood sister ritual. But that was when Darcy had thought she understood the meaning of love, when she’d thought, incorrectly, that love healed, instead of harmed. That, just like in countless corny songs, love lifted you up, instead of grinding you into dust. Maybe her doubts about Heather being gay would work as a backhanded blessing, since everything Darcy touched went to seed.

She went to Heather and gave her the best hug she could muster, all she possessed. Heather’s heart fluttered beneath her like the hummingbirds that had fed at last summer’s red plastic feeder. Her narrow shoulders leaned into Darcy. You thought you knew someone, thought you understood everything about the why of what they did, and it turned out, you didn’t know anything at all.

If she didn’t know a thing about Heather, then she knew even less about Troy. She stepped back and handed Heather a tissue, and the need to tell Heather absolutely everything itched her skin until she just had to scratch. “My mom made Troy an appointment with Dr. Harvey.”

Heather grimaced, making her wide-set eyes cuddle up to the bridge of her nose. Maybe she didn’t remember the name.

“My dad’s shrink. You know, the famous guy who’s such a great doctor that patients are dying to see him.” Right away, she wished she hadn’t thought of that joke. She
really
wished she hadn’t said it.

“God! I’m so sick of hearing about your family.”

Heather’s words slapped Darcy across the face, and her cheeks burned. “Troy could die,” Darcy said. The three little words she hadn’t dared to even think before this moment now hung in the air between them, like a flipped car. Like a bottle of sleeping pills. Like the taste and shape of a gun’s barrel in your mouth.

Heather wrapped her arms around herself, her face reenacting the time she’d accidentally bitten into a habanero pepper.

Darcy went in for a second hug, and Heather jabbed out her palm inches from Darcy’s face.
Talk to the hand.
“My whole life has just changed,” Heather said. “Can you think about
that
for even a minute?”

Heather withdrew the obnoxious hand signal but kept an arm’s-length away.

“So what, you kissed a girl. Big deal. Big
fucking
deal.” Darcy counted on Heather to remember how funny she used to think it sounded when Darcy pronounced
fuck
so properly. She crossed the invisible line Heather had drawn. “C’mon, Heather. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Remember how we used to practice kissing and then practically pee our pants, we’d laugh so hard.”

“You haven’t listened to anything I’ve said!”

Darcy glanced at her locked door, sure her mother would awaken from the tone if not the volume of Heather’s voice. Sure, Darcy had listened plenty. She’d just confided her fear Troy might kill himself, and Heather had equated Darcy’s worry with her out-of-whack angst over kissing a girl, as though being gay were fatal.

“I am so outa here,” Heather said.

“Wait!” Darcy said, trying to wrangle her scrambled thoughts into something approaching coherence. Trying to decide what to do about their friendship.

“Oh, by the way,” Heather said, already halfway out the window. “I want the clothes you borrowed back.”

Too late now. Heather had decided for both of them.

Chapter 20

D
arcy had just lost her best friend, and now she was supposed to call Nick back for more talk about his wife-beater father. What if Nick really did have to see his father? What if Nick’s father beat up Nick?

Daddy used to say, “What would Laura do?” also known as WWLD, whenever Darcy came to him with a problem he couldn’t solve. Way funnier than, “Go ask your mother.”

Darcy couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to Mom for advice or what the problem had been. But she remembered Mom pulling back her blanket. She remembered climbing into her parents’ bed. She’d let her mother stroke her hair, and with each caress, with each whisper and kiss, the trouble had lifted.

She sat on the edge of her bed, twisted open the lid of her special occasion body butter, and released the cupcake aroma. She breathed deeply, dipped into the swirls, and massaged her feet. Darcy didn’t doubt Mom’s nighttime pledge that she’d do anything to keep her safe, which meant she’d keep Darcy safe from Nick, not that she’d help Darcy keep Nick safe from his father. Mom’s pledge guaranteed if she knew about Nick’s family history, she’d forbid Darcy from seeing Nick.

Besides, Mom had sworn to keep Daddy safe, proving she wasn’t good at everything.

Darcy dug her thumbs into her sole to the point of pain, and her foot relaxed. She rubbed her palms together, releasing more fragrance, and then massaged the remaining moisturizer into her hands.

She hoped it wasn’t too late to call Nick and that his household slept as soundly as her mother. What difference would another minute make? Counting out the seconds, she slipped out of her cami and sleep pants and flash-buttered the rest of her body. No time for more massage though. Instead of wrestling her sticky body back into sleep clothes, she left them at the foot of her bed, and slipped her unwrapped cupcake-self between the sheets.

Nick listened to her. She could take care of Nick.

She dialed Nick’s number from under the blankets. The phone rang twice, and silence seeped in while she waited for Nick to answer.

“Whazzup?” he said, sounding as if he were dragging himself from the depths of sleep.

“Just me. Go back to bed.”

He coughed, then cleared his throat. “No, it’s okay. I’m awake.”

“Now that I woke you.”

“What did Heather want?”

Darcy wasn’t even completely sure. Heather had wanted to come out of the closet, she supposed, to reveal her newly acquired gayness. More than that, Heather had been asking for Darcy’s acceptance, which she’d given with a hug. Then, out of nowhere, Heather had rejected Darcy’s family, rejected her. Same difference.

Heather was so sick of hearing about Darcy’s family. “She didn’t want anything at all.”

“Yeah? Like I said. She was trying to get you in trouble.”

“Maybe.” Her slight friend, or ex-friend, had made so much noise clambering down the fire escape that Darcy had been sure her mother or Troy would wake up, convinced of a break-in, and autodial the police. If her mother had woken up and seen Heather, Mom would’ve quadrupled the grounding, extending it for a month, maybe even stopped Darcy from going to the prom with Nick before Darcy had even asked permission.

“I don’t think Heather and I are friends anymore.” Probably, Heather would come out to Cam next and form a newly strengthened alliance, a bond that excluded Darcy. “In fact, I don’t think I have many real friends left.” First Daddy and now Heather. Darcy couldn’t ignore the common denominator.

“Are you okay?” Nick asked.

“I’m fine.” She actually sounded as if she didn’t care about a thing. If she acted as though nothing mattered, then nothing could hurt. “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

“No, wait. I’ve got an idea. I can’t come over, right? But nobody’s gonna use the phone between now and sunrise. So let’s stay on the line.”

“I’m already half asleep.”

“Good. I want to sleep with you. Get where I’m going with this?”

“Uh, phone sex?”

“I mean the dreaming kind of sleep. Stay on the phone, pretend you’re right next to me.” He chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that might turn into phone sex.”

“Okay.” Now she got it. “I’ll do it. The sleeping part, I mean.” She didn’t dare tell him what she wasn’t wearing.

“Hey, I’ll take whatever I can get.”

She cuddled up to the phone, keeping it near enough so they could talk if they wanted. She couldn’t hold down the giggles. “Are you awake?”

“No.”

“I feel funny.”

“You look funny, too, I bet. Hey, Darce? I just wanna tell you I’m your friend. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious. No matter what. Close your eyes.”

She rested her forehead against the receiver and imagined Nick beside her, warming the bed.

“I’m the only friend you need, Darcy.”

Words she meant to say danced around her mouth, and then slipped back down her throat. Her eyes fluttered shut. And she was falling into the dreaming kind of sleep.

“All the other guys just want to use you. All the girls are jealous of you. It’s just us. You and me. All you need.”

Oversized barbells shackled her ankles. The weight of water pressed against her lungs, and she knew she was at the bottom of Greenboro Lake. Clad in scuba gear, Nick swam toward her through the murky darkness. Her heart lifted. When he was close enough to touch, when she reached for him, he flashed one of his killer smiles, the smile that meant he really got her.

A riot of bubbles, and Nick stepped on her chest, forcing out her last breath.

Chapter 21

F
or the third day in a row, Darcy had woken up gradually, not to her mother’s nagging, but to the hum of Nick’s breath through the open phone line. No more nighttime talk about having to see his father, making her wonder whether she’d dreamed Nick’s rant along with that whacked-out nightmare. Her Nick would never hurt her.

She’d spent the whole morning at school searching between classes for Nick, scheming to run into him in the hallways before lunch. Now and again a less pleasant image had nudged Nick from her thoughts, so she stopped at her locker, scooped up Heather’s clothes-filled backpack, and went on a mission.
Just go for it!

Darcy had counted on the scuffle of students on the way to the cafeteria to work in her favor, making the return of Heather’s clothing a quick and painless exchange of goods. Now, rounding the corner and finding Heather by her locker in a tight-knit conversation with Cam, Darcy was sure she’d screwed up massively. Seeing Heather totally messed with Darcy’s ability to hate her. She should’ve waited until later, should’ve gone over to Heather’s house, should’ve made it right between them.

“What do
you
want?” Heather asked, turning in a way that blocked Cam, making Darcy miss him, too.

“I—uh.” Heather’s old backpack shifted on Darcy’s shoulder, and then bopped down the length of her arm, as if the bag had a mind of its own. They all glanced at the bouncing bag.

“Thanks.” Heather grabbed her clothes without looking at Darcy.

Darcy felt her head nodding, her legs walking away. So that was that.

“Darcy, wait,” Heather said.

Darcy turned around, certain the torture was nearing its end. Certain the worst fight she’d ever had with her best friend was coming to a close. In the space of a breath, Darcy saw them watching a movie Friday night and munching homemade kettle corn. Maybe Cam could sleep over, too. She could sleep in the middle.

“Here.” Heather shoved another lumpy backpack at Darcy, similar in vintage and contents to the one she’d given Heather.

Darcy just stood there waiting, for what she couldn’t say. For her life to change, she supposed. For something, anything, to improve, instead of growing increasingly worse.

“Everything’s in there,” Heather said. “I checked twice.”

“Check it again,” Darcy said as a stalling tactic until she could come up with the right thing to say.

“What?” Heather said, although she’d heard every syllable.

Darcy couldn’t think of a single piece of clothing she actually cared about, when all she really wanted back was her best friend. “The pink paisley scarf,” Darcy said, remembering the silk she liked to wear as a belt. “My mother gave it to me. She might want it back and—”

“Fine!” Heather shot Cam a look of
what a bitch
, and Cam returned her eye rolling with a shrug.

Heather fished in the backpack and took all of three seconds—Darcy was counting her breaths—to find the scarf. Heather dangled the scarf in Darcy’s face, close enough to blind her. Now who was the bitch? She snatched it out of Heather’s hands. Well, she’d tried, hadn’t she?

“Cam.” Darcy waited until he’d peeled his attention off Heather. “Wanna watch a movie Friday night?”

There she went. Now she had Heather’s attention, too. Good.

“Yeah, I dunno, Darce.” He looked to Heather, as if he needed her permission and didn’t owe Darcy a thing.

Darcy couldn’t read Cam’s thoughts, but she could always tell when his wheels were churning, grinding down the treads. She shifted from foot to foot. The buzz and rattle of student traffic framed Cam’s refusal to speak.

“Whatever!” she said, clean out of patience after counting five breaths. She so didn’t have time for this.

Typical of her life, Darcy’s worst fear was coming true. Heather and Cam were growing closer, two best friends working together to focus their hatred on the outcast third. The thing that riled Darcy wasn’t so much that it was happening, but that she’d imagined, even briefly, that it would not.

 

From her seat at the front of advanced placement English, resting her chin in her hands and leaning slightly forward, Darcy could hear other students reading aloud their short stories, but could discern no meaning, as though listening to a foreign language she’d never studied.

Darcy straightened up when the bell rang and snatched the wide strap of her backpack.

“I’d like to speak with you about your story.” Mr. Sullivan was heading her way.

Wasn’t that what they were doing in class? She glanced at his eyes, then focused on the flecks of silver in his close-cropped beard, the way they twinkled like tinsel. “Study hall,” she said.

“I’ve already let Mrs. Levesque know you’ll be late.”

“Okay.” She dropped the backpack in the vacant seat beside her. What had she done wrong? She folded her hands in her lap and squeezed them together, pretending her tension ball lay between the palms.

They waited until the last student left the room and the volume in the hallway trailed to nothing.

“So,” he said, moving her backpack over one seat so he could sit right beside her. He scrubbed his hand across his beard, chuckled as though nervous, and then fixed his gaze on hers. “Your story was really, really good. I mean, wow. It just blew me away!”

She released a pent-up breath, smiled. Now she could go!

“The reason I asked you to stay—”

They weren’t done?

“Darcy.” More fixed gaze coming from Sullivan. “Some of the themes you illuminated very much concerned me. And I thought you might like to discuss them.”

No, she did not like.

“Sure.” For the first time, Sullivan’s unflappable calm rubbed her the wrong way and she sensed a dangerous undercurrent.

While she wondered how to get out of this one, Sullivan got her assignment from his accordion folder on his desk, set the papers between them, and removed the clip from her untitled story about a court of fairies and their ephemeral—God, she loved that word—life on the planet Earth. The happy fairies spent their days sipping nectar from long-necked daylilies and flitting between flowers, zigzagging the fairy garden with their butterfly cousins. But unlike their decor winged relatives, a higher being had bestowed upon the fairies a two-sided gift: the knowledge of their mortality.

“I thought, maybe, we could discuss the king of the fairies?”

Darcy shrugged. “What do you mean? Like his robe that reflects twenty-seven different colors or his territory-marking citrus-musk scent?” She’d found the territory-marking idea by googling an article on predators.

Sullivan grinned, but his eyes said something else. “Your details are unbelievably creative. I especially enjoyed how every spoken word makes a unique color and smell. Your writing really rocks.”

Eww!
She hated when teachers tried to sound like kids. She slid her story away from Sullivan and flipped through the pages just for something to do with her hands.

“Darcy.”

She looked up.

“I’m going to read from your story. All right?” he asked, as if she had a choice.

She lifted her hands off the papers, and Sullivan scanned the pages with his finger until he found what he was looking for. He cleared his throat. “ ‘Thoughts of his impending death niggle at the king, for he can never hope to know the details of his last breath. Taking control of the deplorable situation, he usurps the role of the higher being and plans his end in great secrecy.’ ” Sullivan scanned farther down the page without glancing up. “ ‘After setting the scene with all that had comforted him through his days, silks and jewels, colors that no human could see, he drinks deeply from the forbidden black rose, and sinks into the welcoming arms of the great sleep.’ ”

Sullivan sighed like an old lady, the type with bad teeth. “Shall I continue?”

“It’s your class.”

He shuffled the pages, then took a breath. “ ‘When the fairy princess returns from her travels, nothing remains of the king, except the lightest sprinkling of fairy dust and his citrus musk cloying each and every blade of grass in the silent garden. Her father, the king, only forgot one precious detail when gathering his comforts for the eternal journey. He left the princess behind.

“ ‘From that day forward, the abandoned princess wears the forbidden black rose over her heart, pinned directly to her skin, securing the secret gateway to her father.’ ”

Sullivan paused. “Would you like to talk about what I just read?”

The color of the sky kept changing; she could tell even through the grimy school window. Amazing, really, just when she’d get a handle on a particular shade, the baby-boy blue shifted to indigo, the color of Daddy’s eyes.

She knew more than one gateway to her father and none of them required sipping from a black rose. Why, right in her house, hiding innocently behind a year-old bottle of Valerian drops—the herbal sleep aid Maggie had given Mom—sat a nearly full bottle of prescription sleeping pills her mother hadn’t touched in a year. Darcy had sneaked both when she couldn’t take another minute of lying awake staring at the ceiling, and the prescription meds had given her a wicked headache.

Sullivan touched his fingertips to her arm. “Darcy? I said, would you—?”

She looked him in the eye. That’s what he wanted, wasn’t it? “It’s a fairy tale.”

“Yes.” Sullivan’s voice actually cracked. “But even fairy tales tell the truth.”

Which apparently was against the law in Greenboro, New Hampshire. Would a great dramatic confession please Sullivan, a teacher she’d liked up until a few minutes ago? Perhaps he was looking for a play by play of the precise moment when she’d returned home from school to find the town’s entire police department swarming her house, and the sure understanding her father was gone forever.

Perhaps she could map out how her heart had exploded in her chest.

“I need to know,” Sullivan said, “if you’re thinking about hurting yourself.”

The heel of her sandal jangled against the chair’s metal rung. The blue sky had already washed white, barely hinting at indigo.

Sure, she’d thought about it. How could she not, when she had such a legacy to follow, such a fine and shiny example? Car accident, popping pills, blasting your brains out. Daddy had made it look so easy. And she hated him for it.

Sullivan’s chair scraped the floor, and before she realized he’d left, he returned with a box of tissues.

Dry-eyed, she pushed the tissues away using both hands. Once again, he’d read her all wrong. The black rose in her story was a metaphor, a snapshot of feelings past. Not the motion picture of her emotions.
Her
private emotions, not Sullivan’s. Damn him for dissecting her story. Damn him for believing he understood her.

Damn him for even trying.

“No,” she said. Then, just so there could be no mistaking the meaning behind her words, she said, “I’m
not
thinking about hurting myself. Can I leave now?” Despite what Sullivan or anyone else might have thought, she was not her father.

Sullivan scribbled on a scrap of paper. “Here’s my cell phone number. Feel free to call at any hour. My door’s always open. And Mrs. Gould is here for you, too, Darcy.”

Oh, sure, Mrs. Gould, the school shrink, who’d insisted on an appointment last spring and forced Darcy to sit through an hour-long lecture on why her father’s death wasn’t her fault. That had gone so well.

She slid the phone number in her back pocket, nodded in Sullivan’s general direction, and made sure to take her story with her before the idiot submitted it as police evidence.

She slipped into the ladies’ room, carried the wire trash basket into a stall, and took out her emergency pack of matches. Copies of her story were safe in her computer at home and the thumb drive in her backpack, as well as her memory. But the paper copy begged destruction. Sullivan had ruined it for her. Not only had he totally misunderstood what she’d written, he’d managed to hold it against her, as if what she’d really meant were secondary to his screwed-up interpretation.

She dropped Sullivan’s phone number on top of her story, struck a match, and lit the word-decorated kindling on fire. Then she watched the sharp red and orange tongues lick her A plus, curling and blackening the papers’ edges. Remembering the smoke alarms, she dragged the flaming basket back to the sink and squeezed her hands around the faucet, aiming the stream of tepid water like a garden hose.

She stared at what was left of her story, as pleased with the destruction as with the creation. For the life of her, she could not believe Sullivan had read the last paragraph.

The realization starts out slowly, gaining momentum in not merely the princess’s mind, but also in her heart. The king, whom she admired, who spent his brief days casting great magical spells over the kingdom of fairies, wielded his talents as a smoke screen for the larger truth.

The king, her father, was a coward.

 

The temperature must’ve dropped twenty degrees since this morning, and Darcy shivered when Nick pulled his heap into the private drive leading to the lakeside cottage.

Good, still vacant.

They got out of the car, flipped down their seats, and hunched into the backseat. They didn’t have much time. Mom had only given Darcy permission to stay out till nine thirty, half an hour later than her usual school-night curfew. Yahoo’s Pizza Shop stayed open till nine, so why not let her and Nick hang out in the safe public place till closing? Still, Darcy could stretch it further, explain her way out of getting home fifteen or twenty minutes later than expected. Traffic jam, stopping for gas, or Nick dropping off other kids. Her mother didn’t trust her, so why tell the truth?

Nick started toward her, and she closed her eyes. His body pressured her chest.

“What’s wrong?” Nick took his weight off her and sat up suddenly. “Why the tears?”