Freefall (9 page)

Rosetta used her spoon to scoop a big bite of whipped cream. “Don’t be so stuck-up.”

It was too funny having a chick from Rich Bitch Hill calling
me
stuck-up, but I didn’t mention it. Instead, I took a swallow of the super-sugary drink, which scalded my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I was going to be regretting that move for days. “What do you have against coffee, anyway?”

“Nothing, really,” Rosetta said. “Except it’s gross.”

“Have you given it a chance? Because, yeah, at first coffee’s
disgusting. But if you make yourself get through a few cups, you’ll start to realize it isn’t so bad. And then, next thing you know, you’ll be craving the stuff.”

Only then did I realize that Isaac had described beer in almost that same way in seventh grade.

“I’ll be testing your little theory very soon,” Rosetta said. “But first I have to ask the thing I’ve been psyching myself up for since I saw you today. Will you do the ‘secrets’ assignment with me?”

At the end of IC class on Friday, Mrs. Dalloway had announced that our weekend homework was to go outside our comfort zones and tell someone a secret. Then we were supposed to write about how we felt after the big breakthrough.

I shrugged. “I was kind of planning to invent a conversation to put in my journal for that one.”

“Come
on
, now, Dick,” Rosetta said in a chipper, Mrs. Dalloway-ish voice. “You don’t want to deny yourself the chance to communicate interpersonally and reveal your darkest secrets! I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

I got a nervous twinge in my stomach. “You don’t have to do this with me just because we’re both in the class. Mrs. D. said we could tell our secret to anyone.” I pointed to an old guy sitting a few tables away. “You can tell
him
if you want.”

Rosetta laughed. “I don’t even know that man. Besides, I was thinking you’d
be a good choice since you have to do this assignment too.”

“Why? So we can blackmail each other?”

She smirked. “
May
be.”

As much as I didn’t feel like spilling my guts, I
was
curious about what kind of big, dirty secret she had that she’d rather tell me than of one of her friends. “You first,” I said.

“Okay.” She pushed her hair behind her ears. “No one at school knows this, but I haven’t ridden in a car since I moved here over six months ago. The therapist I was seeing diagnosed me with motorphobia, which is the fear of motor vehicles.”

Therapist? So the pretty, rich girl was a mental case. I hadn’t seen
that
coming. And I also couldn’t wrap my head around motorphobia. Fear of heights, crowds, even spiders I could understand. But motor vehicles? It sounded like something made up.

Then I realized she probably
was
making it up, doing that whole persona thing. Which was a relief because now I didn’t have to tell her anything real either.

I laughed. “That’s a good one. Now I can see why you were so mad at me on the first day of school. The thing that scares you the most was trying to mow you down at the crosswalk.”

She picked up her hot chocolate and took a sip. “My
fear of being run over is usually pretty minimal,” she said slowly. “My real panic about cars comes when I try to get inside them.
That’s
why I didn’t accept a ride from you.”

Okay, so she wasn’t laughing with me here. She was kind of frowning, actually, and looking like she was regretting starting this whole conversation. Which was making me think she
hadn’t
been kidding.

“So what happens if you try to get in a car?” I asked, trying to play off that I’d been making fun of her real-life freaky phobia.

She looked suspicious, but went on. “I get these uncontrollable feelings where I can’t breathe and my heart beats like it’s going to explode. And for an even
more
fun time, sometimes I’ll start sweating and shaking and feeling like I’m going to throw up.”

Intense. And yet . . . familiar. Like me thinking about getting onstage.

“Can you be cured?” I asked.

“I don’t know. My shrink said I could. But he was making things worse, so I quit going to him. Since then I’ve been walking everywhere and avoiding all motorized modes of transportation. Seems to be working out fine.”

I couldn’t imagine living like that. From home to school to work and back home again would add up to more than five miles a day for me. “You said nobody knows about your motorphobia. But what about when you’re out with your friends?”

She shrugged. “It’s pretty easy. I meet them wherever we’re
going and then say that my uncle’s picking me up so they don’t expect to drive me home. I do whatever I can to keep anyone from noticing.”

“Wow.” It was all I could think to say. She hardly knew me, and a few days before, she hadn’t even
liked
me. But now she’d told me something—on purpose—that she was keeping from her friends, from everyone.

“Well, this has been embarrassing,” Rosetta said brightly. “But liberating nonetheless.”

“Sorry about that.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. Now you tell me your secret while I try to choke this down.” Then, instead of drinking from the cup like a normal person, she sipped coffee from her spoon and made a face like a little kid being forced to take cough syrup. “This is
not
good,” she said, shaking the spoon at me.

The coffee was terrible. It tasted like it had been sitting for a week, which actually made her reaction truer and her taste test less accurate than she knew. She was cracking me up with all the weird faces.

“Keep drinking. You’re going to love it by the time you finish,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose and kept loading her spoon up while I tried to decide on a secret to tell her. There was one thing I didn’t ever discuss, but I was feeling like maybe I could talk about it with her. Maybe I even wanted to.
And I did feel like I owed her something real after laughing at her.

“I have a phobia too,” I said. “I’m in a band and I’ve played probably over twenty live gigs, but I have stage fright. Like, bad. I mean, maybe not quite as bad as your car thing, but still. It’s crazy.”

She gave me a small smile and I imagined that she was thinking:
My phobia is
so
much worse than
your
silly phobia
. Then she said, “It sounds like you’re working around it if you’ve played onstage over twenty times.”

“Yeah, well, my friend Isaac had these pregig rituals that would get my mind off things and make me feel ready to play,” I said, purposely leaving out the part about how those “rituals” usually including sitting in a car with the stereo blaring, passing Isaac’s flask back and forth until it was empty, and swallowing a pill or two. “He died over the summer, and about a week ago, I had to play my first gig without him. It was so bad, I don’t think I can put myself through it ever again.”

Rosetta nodded, and I could tell she totally got it. “I used to see your friend around sometimes,” she said. “But I didn’t know him at all.”

“We started hanging out when we were twelve. He played guitar and I play bass and we ended up joining my brother’s band together.” That same queasy feeling I got whenever I remembered what happened to Isaac was kicking in, but I needed to tell her the rest. She was the first person I’d actually
wanted
to talk about it with. “In July
there was this one night when we both got pretty wasted. When I went inside for bed, he said he was just going to crash out under the stars. The next morning I found his body under a rosebush in my front yard. I was the last person to see him alive and the first to see him dead.”

Rosetta was biting her lip; gnawing it, actually. “I think I know what that felt like for you.”

I couldn’t guess how she could know anything about it, but she was looking at me like she did understand, like she wanted to help.

“Was it alcohol poisoning?” she asked.

I took a big gulp of coffee. “No. And it wasn’t a drug overdose either. The official cause of death was asphyxiation. He was on his back and threw up while he was unconscious. So, basically, he drowned on his own puke.”

“Oh!” She stared at me so intently that I had to look away. “That must have been
horrible
for you.”

Horrible. Yes.

“If I’d thought to go out and check on him, if I’d made sure he was lying on his side or his stomach, he’d probably be alive right now,” I said.

Rosetta reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “It isn’t your fault.”

I didn’t want her to let me off the hook. “I screwed up and now he’s dead.”

“You didn’t know it was going to happen like that. You couldn’t have guessed.”

No, I couldn’t have. But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow I
should
have.

I waited for Rosetta to say something else, but she seemed to be waiting for me. Finally she squeezed my hand one more time and let go.

7:24
A.M.

Two days later. My tutoring had been canceled for the morning, so I should have been able to take my time before school. Instead, Jared and Daniel had come stumbling home in time to rope me into dropping them off at Denny’s for breakfast.

Jared was spacing out in the front seat. Daniel was talkative as hell in the back. And me? I was driving along, having mad beer cravings from smelling it on their breath. Their
breath
, for Christ’s sake.

“I have to get me one of those scrambled-egg sandwiches,” Daniel said. “What do they call that shit again?”

I wasn’t in the mood, but I played along. “Moons Over My Hammy.”

Daniel started howling, and even though it wasn’t
funny to me, I got why it was to him. There’s nothing more hilarious than someone saying “Moons Over My Hammy” when you’re drunk, stoned, or sleep-deprived; Daniel was all three.

“Where were you guys last night?” I asked.

I didn’t want to know what I’d missed. Except, for some weird reason, I
needed
to know.

“Out at CJ’s,” Daniel said, scooting all the way forward so that his face was between Jared and me.

I rolled down my window to breathe some nonbeer air while Daniel put his arms around our seats and started shaking us. “We were celebrating like the rock stars we will soon become!”

“Chill, dude,” Jared said.

“Yeah, sit down.” I nudged Daniel’s chest with my elbow. “And put your seatbelt on before a cop shows up and gives you a ticket.”

All Daniel’s talk about becoming rock stars was adding to my guilt. I was still stressed over how to tell them I wasn’t going on tour. Knowing that
I
was going to be the one to kill Daniel’s good mood wasn’t making it easier.

“Goddamn seatbelt laws,” Daniel said. But he scooted back and put it on anyway. It was a good thing, too, because a police car came swinging around in the rearview mirror less than a minute later.

“Shit,” I said.

Jared startled upright. “What?”

“Cop!”
My heart was kicking up to high speed already.

Jared sighed. “Swear to God, you’re killing me with this cop-scare bullshit.”

You’d think he’d have taken this seriously. I mean, if he’d been more careful back when he still had his license, he wouldn’t have been relying on his little brother to drive him around in his own car.

“Do you think they’re after me?” I asked.

Daniel laughed. “I think you have bad karma, Dick. Get it? Karma sounds like ‘car.’ Cops stalk you because of your
car-
ma—”

“Yeah, I get it.”

Drunk Daniel was kind of annoying when I was dead sober.

“You’re not breaking any laws, bro,” Jared said. “Calm down.”

I probably
was
breaking laws. Laws I didn’t even know existed. Not to mention the things my passengers were up to. But I couldn’t get busted for what they were doing, could I? Unless I got pulled over, they stashed their stuff somewhere, and then the car got searched.

Okay. Jared was right; this paranoia was getting out of hand.

“Hey, check it out,” Jared said. “The speedo’s working.”

I looked away from my mirrors to sneak a glance at the dash. Sure enough, the speed gauge was up.

“How fast are we going?” Daniel asked.

Jared said, “Looks like twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.”

“Dick, I
told
you!” Daniel said. “You’re going almost ten
under the speed limit. No wonder you’ve always got pigs after you.”

I hit the gas, annoyed that he might have been right. “You know, this might not be about my driving at all. Maybe there’s a warrant out for your arrest or something.”

“Ri-ight,” Daniel said, laughing. “You really don’t know much about the cops in this town if you think they’d just follow us around if they had a warrant.” Then he turned around and yelled, “You looking for me, piggy?”

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

Daniel kept it up. “You want me, you come and
arrest
my ass!”

I had to stop him before he did something insane. It’s all fun and games until your friend riles up the cops, right? I flipped my blinker on and yielded for a left at the next light.

Seconds later the cop breezed on by in the right lane like he hadn’t even noticed we were there.

Daniel busted up laughing again.

“New theory, Seth,” Jared said. “Cops are always driving on the same roads as you because they don’t have a lot of other roads to choose from.”

“Whatever.”

We were close enough to see the Denny’s sign by now. Daniel started singing in falsetto: “I need your moons over my hammy, baby. Moons over my hammy toniiiiiight!”

Then he took off his seatbelt again, lunged forward, jerked the wheel, and steered us toward a curb, then a utility pole, and then oncoming traffic.

“Will you fucking
stop
?” I yelled.

Jared shoved Daniel back so I could get control again. But not long after, the ride went from feeling like smooth sailing to 4x4ing through the Grand Canyon. With all the bouncing and shaking and lurching, I had a tough time turning into the restaurant parking lot.