Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover (2 page)

I glance over my shoulder to the door. Where the hell is Lungren?

Shallow, gaspy sounds fall from Kennedy’s mouth. Her face is colorless, bloodless, as if she’s about to pass out.

“You know”—I lean across the aisle—“it’s not that big of a deal.”

“It’s … it’s detention,” she says between hiccup-y cries. She sways.

I grab her arm and keep her upright. “And your point?”

She blinks and takes a deep breath.

Good. Breathing is good.

“My parents will k … k … kill me, my teachers will think I’m turning into a delinquent, my friends won’t want to hang out with me, and I won’t be class valedictorian next year.”

Excellent. She’s not dying. She’s just a wack job. I let go of her arm. “The only people who will know you’re in detention are Lungren, your parents, and yours truly, and I’m not about to broadcast details of this little tea party over the school radio station.”

“But—”

“See this?” I jam my notebook under her nose. “The secret to putting this experience behind you is to complete Lungren’s assignment. If you don’t, she’ll have you here tomorrow and every day after until you finish. You need to shut up and write. Just write.”

Kennedy opens her notebook. “Write. Just write.”

My brilliant wisdom is not lost on me. I, too, need to write a bucket list. Unlike Macey, I can’t bolt. I skipped out on detention last month, and Lungren warned me in her singsongy counselor voice,
If you skip another detention, you get a week-long suspension,
which would not be good for my current math grade. Plus, I’d be forced to stay at home with Aunt Evelyn 24-7, which would not be good for my physical and mental well-being. This time I need to play by the rules.

I snap open the cover of my
journal
. The problem is, I’m not good at rules. A let’s-cut-to-the-chase therapist told me years ago that I have problems with rules because I spent the first ten years of my life barefoot. He said if I started wearing shoes, Aunt Evelyn would be in a happier place, she’d stop punishing me so much, and the entire world would make paper cranes instead of nuclear bombs.

And I’m going to be nominated for Mistletoe Queen.

I aim my pencil stub like a pistol at my notebook.
Bucket list
sounds too normal. I lick the tip of my pencil and write,
Goodbye, Rebel Blue.

A shadow passes over the paper. “Uh, thanks for the advice. I’ve never been in detention before.”

Kennedy straddles the chair in front of my desk.

I peek through a streak of blue hair hanging across my face. Her cheeks are no longer bloodless.

She isn’t going to die in my presence. Therefore, she is no longer my problem.

“I was exaggerating when I said my parents would kill me. They have high expectations, but I’m harder on myself than they are. I want to do things right, you know? Be the best me I can be.”

I draw wavy lines and swirls alongside my notebook’s spiral.

She places her arms on the chair back and tilts her head. “I’m not sure if you remember, Rebel, but we had art together freshman year.”

I add design lines to the top of the page.

“You want to hear something weird?” She edges closer, her ponytail swinging forward and brushing against the top of my desk.

I sketch more squiggles at the bottom of the paper. They look like waves, and I add shells and a starfish. The starfish flips off Kennedy.

“Our freshman year I thought it would be kind of neat if we could be friends. You know, the whole color thing, Rebecca Blue and Kennedy Green. Because—get this—blue-green is my favorite color. Not teal or aqua but blue-green, the world’s most perfect color, and here we are again, Blue and Green.”

I write the numbers one through twenty down the left side of the page.

“Oh, good! You’re starting your bucket list. It’s a weird assignment but fascinating. You can learn a lot about people when you know the things they want to do before they die.”

I give her the you-are-annoying-the-crap-out-of-me look I reserve for Aunt Evelyn on her I’m-grounding-you-for-life days.

“I think about death sometimes and what happens next. I think people who live good lives on Earth go to good places when they die. Do you ever think about death?”

Yes. Right now.

“My grandmother died while she was having open-heart surgery last year. She flatlined for more than a minute, but the doctors brought her back. She said it was the most incredible sixty seconds of her life. She saw a golden light and a lady in gold and a tunnel with glittery gold bricks. Maybe that’s why my heaven is gold.” She’s so close, I smell her shampoo. Sunshine and citrus. “What color’s your heaven?”

Ignoring Kennedy is clearly not working. “Black,” I say. “The color of a world six feet under, with hundreds of gray squiggles, which would be worms eating at my decaying corpse.”

She draws closer, not repulsed. She should be repulsed. “You don’t believe in life after this one?

You believe that this”—she waves at the kitty posters—“is all there is?”

“I believe you are a moron.”

“I understand.” Kennedy uses Lungren’s creepy counselor tone. “Talking about death and dying is hard for most people. Some people are afraid of death and what lies beyond.”

“I am not afraid of death, because there’s nothing beyond death. No feelings, no fear, no me.”

Her dopey grin fades away. “What are you afraid of, Rebel? Right here. Right now.” Her voice softens, but the sharpness, the brightness in her eyes intensifies. “Don’t tell me
nothing
, because everyone’s afraid of something.” I open my mouth, and she points an arrow-straight finger at my chest. “No lies.”

I almost laugh.
Lies?
Not in my world. “I’m afraid of being ordinary.”

Her face remains serious. “You, Rebel Blue, are anything but ordinary.” She settles her spine against the desk and picks at the back of the chair, flecks of brown paint drifting to the floor like sand.

“I’m afraid of spiders and twenty-foot squid and phone calls that come in the middle of the night.”

She scratches harder, faster. “I’m afraid of disappointing others: friends, parents, teachers, Ms.

Lungren, even the clerk at the grocery store. When I pick apples from the produce bin, I rearrange the ones left in the display so there are no holes.” A paint chip wedges under her nail, and she winces.

“Pretty creepy, huh?”

“No, it’s just you being … being you.”

She toes the bits of brown dusting the floor. “And sometimes being me may not be a great thing.”

She tries to smile, but it comes across as a twisted grimace.

“Never apologize for being you.” That’s what my mom used to say.

“Really?” Kennedy looks up at me with eyes that care way too much about what I say.

“You know what?” I add. “This entire conversation is creepy, and it needs to end.”

Kennedy shakes the paint chips from her fingers, her ponytail once again bobbing. “Not before I thank you for being here for me. People are exactly where they need to be when they need to be there.

You were here for me when I needed you, and I’m here for you.” Her hand settles over mine.

“Remember that. It’s fate.”

I stare at our hands, speechless.

Footsteps clatter in the hall, and I spin toward the door.
Please, please, let it be Lungren or
anyone to shut up Ms. What-Color-Is-Your-Heaven.
Nope. It’s Percy, the head custodian. He rolls in with his cleaning cart and checks the underside of a desk in the back row. He takes a shiny spatula from his belt and scrapes off a wad of pink. After checking all the desks, he wipes the whiteboard, empties the wastebasket, salutes me with the gum scraper, and walks out, his left eye twitching.

Kennedy clucks her tongue. “Case in point, Percy Cole.”

I bang my forehead on the desk. “You’re not going to shut up, are you?”

“Haven’t you heard his story?”

“I hate stories,” I say to the desktop.

“Well, you’re going to love this one. Percy served in Desert Storm and was on a supply mission when a roadside bomb went off. Eleven soldiers, including the men on either side of Percy, died.

Why? Why did he live? It’s destiny, I say. A force bigger than all of us kept him here, and he’s alive because he’s still needed here.”

My head snaps upright. “To scrape gum off desks?”

“Only the fates know.”

“The fates know squat. I control my own destiny.”

“To some degree, yes. We have power over how we respond to events and our attitude about them, but I passionately believe there’s a higher being or unseen force that places us where we need to be when we need to be there. I think you and I, Rebel Blue and Kennedy Green, are meant to be right here in this room right at this moment talking about this subject. Blue and Green. We’re linked.

Destined to share each other’s journeys.”

“I think Lungren was having a PMS kind of morning.” I cover my face with my notebook.

“You’re pushing me away again,” she says with something that sounds like amused wisdom. “But that’s okay. You have a guarded heart. The glowering looks, the snarky comebacks, even the shark teeth on your bag—they’re all designed to keep people away. But we all need friends, and I consider you a friend.”

I lower the notebook. “We are
not
friends! We’re two strangers stuck in detention. I don’t care about your fears. I don’t care about the fates. For all I care, you and your turtles can take a one-way trip to your golden heaven.”

Her lips form an O, and she turns stiffly in her chair. I jab my pencil into my notebook and scribble all the things I want to do before my butt lands in a casket and starts to decay.

“Hey, it looks like you got into it, too.” Kennedy stands over my desk, grinning. “Wasn’t this whole bucket-list thing fun?”

I squint at my notebook and blink. The page is full of words.

“It’s five o’clock, and Ms. Lungren isn’t back,” Kennedy says. “I wonder what happened to Macey. She looked upset.” She tugs at the end of her ponytail. “We should probably help her. You know, find her and let her know detention isn’t the end of the world, that this whole bucket-list thing was fun.”

I study the words bleeding across the page, words supposedly mined from the deepest part of my heart. A sharp, unexpected ache fills my chest.

“What are we supposed to do with our lists? We can leave them on the desk for Ms. Lungren.”

Kennedy taps her chin with her pen. “But she told us to keep them. Maybe we should make copies.

Then we can take the notebooks with us.”

My finger slides over the final two lines, little more than faint scratches. The page blurs.

A hand lands on my arm. “Rebel, did you hear me? Maybe we should make copies.”

I tear the list from the notebook and wad it into a ball. Tighter. Smaller. Impossible to read. I lob the paper into the trash. This assignment, the entire idea of digging deep into my heart, is a waste of my life. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

Kennedy’s mouth puckers in surprise, and a second later a tiny grin sneaks onto her lips. “Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t.” She casts a nervous glance at the doorway and then tosses her list into the trash.

I sling my messenger bag across my chest and rush out of the detention room. Away from Kennedy. Away from that list.

Kennedy follows, her ponytail no longer bobbing but bouncing. “I think you’re an interesting person. And fun.”

The gate at Unit Eight is locked. I race-walk down the breezeway and try the gate near Unit Four.

Also locked.

“Maybe we can go out for chai tea sometime and talk. People say I’m easy to talk to.”

I try the gate near the gym. No go.

“Or smoothies. Would you like to go out for smoothies?”

“I’d rather drink a cup of kitty.” I mentally blot out annoying inspirational posters of kitties in teacups and sprint through the quad, the ache in my chest growing. Stupid cigarettes. Finally I reach the main gate and freedom, but I don’t celebrate. Aunt Evelyn is going to explode when she hears about detention, a blowup of nuclear proportions.

Kennedy pops up beside me and rests her hand on my shoulder. “You don’t look well. Do you need something?”

I slide my fingers along my messenger bag, the shark teeth strung across the strap making a comforting tinkle. “I need a bomb shelter.”