Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover (4 page)

Dead Kennedy Green.

A police officer with a shiny badge and shinier bald head meets Nate and me in a small conference room in the school guidance center. “Good morning, Rebecca, Nate.”

I sit on the edge of the chair nearest the door and wrap my arms across my chest. The cold, hard shark teeth on my messenger bag bite into my bare arm.

The officer pulls out a tablet. “I’m not sure if you heard yet, but one of your classmates, Kennedy Green, died in a car crash last night. We’re investigating, and, as we understand it, you were two of the last people to see her alive.”

My flip-flops shuffle under my chair. Kennedy was right; I’m not the sort who likes talking about death. I’d rather talk about sharks with psych issues.

The officer taps on his tablet. “We need to know Kennedy’s mind-set yesterday afternoon. Was she happy, sad, upset? Did she seem nervous or agitated?”

“Why?” I ask. Keep him talking. That way I don’t have to talk about death. After Mom died, Aunt Evelyn desperately wanted to talk about my
feelings
. “It’s okay to be sad,” she kept insisting.

“It’s normal to cry, Rebecca. You can cry. Why aren’t you crying?”

The officer clears his throat. “The car crash that killed your friend was a single-car incident, and we’re investigating to determine if it was accidental or purposeful.”

I scrape my jaw from the floor. “Suicide? You think Kennedy Green committed suicide? She was the world’s happiest person.” People who plan on decorating the gym for prom next month don’t kill themselves.

“There were no adverse weather conditions, no road hazards, and that portion of the highway is straight,” the officer explains. “We need to determine her state of mind at the time, and you two should be best able to tell us.”

Early in detention, Kennedy sobbed a river of snot and tears and was beating herself up for getting detention, but I calmed her and …

My blood chills.

… and told her and the endangered sea turtles to go to their golden heaven.

“So, Rebecca, was Kennedy distraught, or did she act in any way strange when you two were in detention?”

I lose my ability to speak. Kennedy was upset, but was she upset enough to kill herself? Did my snarky comments and less-than-warm-and-fuzzy behavior send her over the edge?

Of course they didn’t. We were strangers, two girls sharing two hours of despised detention. I don’t have a big enough ego to believe I have that much power over someone. Plus there’s the fact that Kennedy left detention chipper and cheery. She invited me to go out for smoothies.

I’d rather drink a cup of kitty.

The room grows colder, darker.

Nate clears his throat. “Kennedy was fine at the 100 Club meeting, excited about getting the bird habitat we’ve been working on done. But she was late. That was strange because Kennedy is—was— always on time.”

“She had detention,” I say. “We were both in detention for doing something”—the entire room brightens as if a giant lightbulb bursts to life—“‘dangerous, even deadly,’ Ms. Lungren said. Maybe Ms. Lungren caught her doing something to harm herself. I don’t know what she did to end up in detention. She never said.” And I never asked. Because I wanted her dead, but not
dead
dead.

“Yes, I talked to Ms. Lungren already,” the officer says. “She explained that Kennedy was in detention because she’d driven recklessly into the school parking lot yesterday morning.”

Nate nods. “She sped out of the parking lot after the club meeting really fast, too. Tires squealing.”

I sink back in my seat. “She said it was a crazy-busy day, and she was probably driving crazy.”

The officer types notes on his tablet. “Yes, sounds like Kennedy wasn’t the safest of drivers yesterday, but in the interest of leaving no stone unturned, did anything happen at the club meeting or detention to upset her?”

Nate shakes his head.

I try to shake off the image of me calling her a moron, which was said in a flash of irritation, not even anger. I was irritated that I had to write a stupid bucket list and worried about Aunt Evelyn’s reaction.

After a moment or two of silence, the officer motions for us to stand. “Thank you, and I’m sorry about your friend.”

We are
not
friends!

Let’s not forget that nugget, either.

Outside the office, the halls are empty and silent except for the echo of our footsteps. Second period must have already begun, which is good because I need quiet. I gnaw the inside of my cheek and think. At the beginning of detention, Kennedy had been emotionally and physically distraught— enough for even me to notice.

Nate takes a step toward me, reaching out but not touching. “You okay?”

I give him my back-away-from-the-bubble look.

“Whatever.” He glances at his watch and hitches his backpack onto his shoulder. “We’d better get to class, or we’ll get detention.”

Detention! Of course. I need to get to the detention room to find Kennedy’s bucket list. Her list will shed light on her emotional and mental state, and because Percy emptied the wastebasket before we left, the crumpled piece of paper still sits in it.

I run to Unit Seven, but the detention room is locked. I run outside. The Del Rey School has long, one-story buildings with thick adobe walls and narrow windows designed to keep out heat. In late spring, most of the windows are cracked open. Pressing myself against the side of the building, I hurry to the third window. At five feet tall, I’m too short to reach. I jump, my fingertips clawing the ledge.

“Breaking and entering is illegal.”

My fingers slip, but I dig my nails into the adobe again. “You scared the crap out of me,” I say to Nate, keeping my voice low. I haul myself up to the ledge, where I anchor my elbows, reach inside, and tug on the window crank. It groans and creaks open. I crank faster. The handle snaps off. “Damn!”

“Defacing school property is also illegal,” Nate says in a loud voice.

I toss the crank to the ground, and it lands wonderfully close to his right tennis shoe. “If you’re going to narc, do it already, and shorten this special moment.”

He crosses his arms. “Exactly what are you doing?”

“Breaking and entering,” I say.

“Why?”

“I love detention.” I wrench open the window, pitch my body through the narrow space, and crash into a stack of chairs. The chairs scatter across the room, and I scramble to my knees and listen. A door opens somewhere at the end of the hall.

Bolting to the wastebasket, I grope until I find two waddedup pieces of paper, one covered mostly in doodles, the other, twenty neat lines.

“What’s that?”

“Shit!”

Nate stands six inches behind me, his fists on his hips, his biceps straining against the sleeves of his polo, like some preppy detention-room guardian. He crawled through the window without a sound, all strength and agility and grace. Definitely a sporto.

He tilts his chin at Kennedy’s bucket list in my shaking hand. “What’s that?” he asks again.

I jam the paper into the thigh pocket of my cargo pants. “Trash.”

“Now you’re stealing.”

“Someone threw it away. How can that be stealing?”

“It’s not yours.”

“It’s trash!”

Footsteps clomp outside in the hallway. The door handle rattles. No time to argue about garbage.

I stuff the other list into my pocket, rush to the window, grab a chair, and balance it on a desk.

Climbing my makeshift ladder, I hurl my body through the window and don’t bother to worry about how Mr. Squeaky Clean is going to get out of this mess.

THE LUNCH BELL RINGS, BUT I DON’T HEAD FOR MY normal spot near the bike racks, a lunchtime hangout haunted by the Del Rey School’s other detention regulars. Nor do I go to Miss Chang’s fifth-period art class, where I sometimes help her first-year students. I would never set foot in the cafeteria, a place for people wanting to see and be seen, like Cousin Penelope and the Cupcakes. Instead, I swim upstream through the crush of bodies to the locker courtyard in search of Death.

At a locker bay near the drinking fountains, I spot a black hoodie. “I need to show you something,” I tell Macey.

Macey throws her math book into her locker and pulls out two bulging plastic grocery bags.

“What?”

I slip my hand into my pants pocket, my knuckles brushing the piece of paper I’d stolen from the detention-room wastebasket. After checking into second-period AP English, a class I actually enjoy, I got a pass and spent most of the hour in the bathroom near the auto shop building reading Kennedy Green’s bucket list. “Not here. It’s something kind of personal.”

Macey closes her locker. “I’m … uh … kind of busy.”

I take one of Macey’s bags and tilt my head at the end of the locker bay. “Fine. We’ll talk while you do your ‘busy.’”

For a moment, Macey looks startled, but she takes me along the breezeway to Unit Four and into one of the Family and Consumer Science classrooms.

The FACS teacher waves at us. “Hi there, Macey. I’m so glad you decided to come after all. And you brought a friend! Wonderful. The kitchen’s ready. Let me know if you girls need any help.”

Macey mumbles something that sounds like
I’ll be fine
or
You have the eyes of a swine
. She takes her bags to one of six tiny U-shaped kitchens and unloads a truckload of strawberries and bags of sugar and flour.

I hoist myself onto the counter, the heels of my flip-flops tapping a cupboard door. “Did you hear about Kennedy Green?”

Macey takes a large glass bowl and measuring cup from the cupboard. She opens a bag of flour and starts spooning flour into the measuring cup.

“She’s the princess who was in detention with us yesterday. Blond ponytail.” Perky no longer. I hop off the counter.

Macey puts the cup on a scale, squints, and scoops another spoonful of flour.

“She’s dead.”

Macey’s spoon hovers above the measuring cup.

“She was driving home from one of her do-gooder meetings last night and had a car accident. She drove off a cliff.” Images and sounds careen through my head. Rushing sky, tumbling rocks, a single scream. My breath quickens.

“Uh, excuse me.”

My eyes pop open.

Macey points at the cupboard behind me. “I need salt.” She measures the salt and adds it to her bowl. “What does her death have to do with you?”

“Kennedy’s death has nothing to do with me.”
Blue and Green. We’re linked. Destined to share
each other’s journeys.
I start to pace around the tiny kitchen, my flip-flops slapping the bottoms of my feet.

Macey takes a block of butter from a teeny-tiny fridge and slices and dices it into a million pieces.

“Would you stop the Martha Stewart bit and read this?” I wave Kennedy’s bucket list in Macey’s face. “Is there anything on here that makes you think she was suicidal?”

For the first time since we arrived in the FACS kitchen, Macey stills. She wipes her flour-dusted hands on the towel at her waist and takes the list, her pale, skeletal fingers careful, almost reverent.

She studies the words. After a few minutes, she hands me the paper. “No.”

A relieved breath whooshes from my chest. After reading the list, I didn’t sense any suicidal or even angsty vibe, but I’m no psychology expert. Macey’s second opinion reinforces my own that Kennedy’s death was not suicide, and therefore I can put the entire thing out of my mind. I waltz to the trash can at the end of the row of kitchens.

“Stop!” An uncharacteristic pink flushes Macey’s normally ghost-y cheeks. “You’re not going to throw that away, are you?”

“It’s a piece of paper.”

Macey picks at a glob of buttery flour on the ragged cuff of her hoodie. “It seems weird to throw someone’s … uh … dreams and desires into the garbage.”

“What am I supposed to do with it? Have some sacred sending-off ceremony? Frame it and give it to her next of kin? Kennedy is dead. Dead people don’t care about things left on Earth.” I hold my hand over the garbage, where inside something with a brown body, long antennas, and grotesquely jointed legs skitters.