Rush (8 page)

Kelley and Dee are right behind her. I’m enveloped by my friends, who ask over and over if I’m okay. I tell them I am. I’m lying. I’m so far from okay, it’s laughable.

I mutter reassurances and glance around for Luka. He’s on his feet, backing away.

Janice Harper’s standing on the curb, signing back and forth with her little sister. She lifts her head and looks at me. Her eyes are wide, her face pale. She squats down and pulls her sister into a tight hug, her gaze locked on mine. “Thank you.” I can’t hear her over the chatter of my friends, but I see her lips shape the words.

I did it. I saved her. Chaos under control. My brain pats me on the back, tells me to feel good, job well done. But I can’t quite get there.

The metallic clang of a door slamming snags my attention. The driver of the truck leans against the hood, phone in hand. He talks, his fingers running repeatedly through his thinning hair, his face furrowed in concern. A moment later, sirens wail in the distance.

He takes one look at me surrounded by my friends and heads toward Luka. He stops and says something I can’t hear. Luka nods and answers.

“Miki!” Carly snaps her fingers. “Talk to me. You seem kind of spacey.”

That’s one way of putting it. “I’m fine. Really.”

Hands grasp my upper arms, helping me to my feet. I’m surprisingly steady, no dizziness, no pain other than the twinge of my scraped elbows. I hold on to Carly’s hand while Dee rubs my back and Kelley stares at me and presses her palms together and holds her fingers to her lips.

“Should you be standing? Should you be moving?” Kelley’s hands flutter out to the sides now like butterflies. “I’m a lifeguard. I took first aid. I don’t think you should be moving.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Maybe Kelley’s right,” Dee says. “Maybe you shouldn’t be moving. You could have a concussion. Or a fractured neck. I saw this show where this guy was tackled during football practice and he thought he was okay and then a couple of days later he died because some bone at the top of his neck was actually broken and he”—her voice trails away as the others turn to stare at her—“died.”

“I’m fine,” I say again, and glance over at Luka. He’s on the far side of the road, his expression anything but happy, his arms crossed over his chest. I’m confused. We’re alive. We made it. What’s he so pissed about? I take a step toward him. “I just need to—”
ask Luka something
. I don’t get to finish my sentence because the police pull up, followed by an ambulance.

“You’re not normal,” Kelley says.

I wince. Carly glares at her. Dee gasps.

Cardinal sin—publicly calling me out on one of my issues. I have to bite my tongue to keep from hurling one of Kelley’s own back in her face. I’m not usually quite that vindictive, but at the moment, my defenses are pretty shredded.

“Don’t do it,” Carly says. “She didn’t mean it that way.” And that’s enough to ground me. I know that if I snarl at Kelley, I’ll just regret it later.

“I mean, you’re so calm,” Kelley rushes on, flushing. “If I was almost hit by a truck, I wouldn’t be so calm. That’s all I mean. I don’t really mean that
you’re not normal
; I just mean—”

“I know.” I cut her off because the look on her face tells me that she feels like crap for saying the wrong thing, and right now, I don’t want to feel like crap because she feels like crap because she’s worried about my hurt feelings. Right now, the only person I want to talk to is Luka. He’s right there, maybe twenty feet away. Twenty feet that might as well be a thousand, because it’s painfully apparent that Luka doesn’t want to talk to
me
.

And the fact that Luka isn’t talking makes me think of Jackson. He promised that once we were done, he’d give me all the answers. An easy promise to make when he knew he wouldn’t be here to hear the questions. I laugh darkly. My friends stare, but I’m saved from offering explanations as one of the EMTs strides over.

The next half hour passes in a blur. The EMTs check me out. The police take my statement. I think they write the driver a ticket, but I’m not sure.

They’re done with Luka before they’re done with me. With his back to me, he lifts his hand in a farewell wave, then walks away without even a glance, leaving me sitting in the open back of the ambulance while an EMT finishes bandaging my elbows.

I feel like crying; I feel like curling in a ball. I feel like punching something so hard that the skin on my knuckles splits. I feel like running for miles. Running away.

I can still see Luka in the distance when they’re finally done with me. I’m about to bound after him when a dark blue Ford Escape pulls up, blocking
my
escape. Dad jumps out, his dark hair disheveled like he’s run his fingers through it again and again. His mouth is tight, bracketed by lines of worry. He stands perfectly still, only his dark eyes moving until they light on me, and then he’s moving, his strides eating the distance between us.

“You would have done exactly what I did,” I say the second his arms close around me. I take a deep breath. He smells like fabric softener and spicy shaving cream. He smells like Dad and memories of childhood. He smells safe. And I’m incredibly grateful that right now, he doesn’t smell like booze.

He tightens his embrace for a second and then releases me. “Yeah,” he says, his voice like gravel. “But it doesn’t mean that my blood didn’t turn to ice when I got Carly’s call.”

“She didn’t need to call you.” I shoot her a dark look where she’s standing on the sidewalk with Dee and Kelley, but she isn’t looking my way.

“
You
should have called me.”

“I’m fine.” It’s my day to do the parrot thing. First I kept squawking
what, what, what
and now it’s
I’m fine
.

Dad gives me a stern look, and I press my lips together and say nothing. The truth is, I’m glad Carly called him. I’m glad he’s here.

He walks me to the car and holds the front passenger door open for me while Carly and Kelley and Dee pile into the back.

“You want company?” he asks softly before I get in.

I shake my head. I love my friends, but right now, I just want my music and my privacy.

“I’ll take them home, then.”

I start to climb into the car, then pause with one foot inside and my hand on the roof as a cold wind touches the back of my neck. Except there is no wind.

I stare first up, then down the street.

Luka’s not gone after all. He’s there in the distance, watching me, as if he wants to make sure that I’m okay. Or to make sure I don’t say anything I shouldn’t.

But I still don’t get in the car. I take my time looking around because I can’t shake the feeling that he’s not the only one watching me.

THE ALIEN IS REACHING FOR ME, SMOOTH, GLOWING LIMBS AND clawed fingers. Jackson is there, beside me. I wait for him to shoot. Why doesn’t he shoot? His booted foot slams into the alien’s hand, sending its weapon flying through the air, turning end over end
.

There’s a loud bang as the weapon hits the floor, then another and another.
Bang. Bang
.

I jerk awake, heart pounding, muscles twitching. My curtains are drawn, a sliver of early September sunlight leaking through the narrow crack where they meet. Someone’s outside, banging on the door. Jackson. The second his name surfaces, I realize how unlikely the possibility is. He might be part of my nightmares—the one I lived yesterday and the ones I relived throughout the night—but he isn’t part of my world.

With a groan, I roll to my side, get a look at the clock, and lurch to a sitting position. I missed my run. I missed the bell. Hell, I missed half my classes. Then I remember it’s Saturday. No run, no bell, no classes, no school. That’s both a relief—because I don’t really want to face stares, whispers, or a bunch of questions about what went down yesterday—and a disappointment—because school means Luka, and Luka’s my one hope for answers.

The person outside applies fist to door once more. Give them the prize for persistence.

I roll out of bed and head for the window, pull it open, and stick my head out. “Hey!”

Carly steps out from under the overhang that covers the front porch. I’m not surprised to see her; anyone else would probably have used the bell. But Carly started knocking at my door when she was so little that she couldn’t reach the bell, and she kept knocking even as she grew.

“Hey, yourself.” Her hair has a new bright pink streak on the right side. She’s carrying a cardboard tray with two coffees, and she holds it to the side as she squints up at me. “I have told at least twenty people my eyewitness account of your heroics. Mostly because you aren’t answering your phone, so you can’t tell them yourself.” She tips her head to the side. “For someone who slept in, you look like crap.”

“Thanks. I feel like crap.” I might have slept in, but I don’t feel rested. No surprise. Despite being exhausted, I had trouble falling asleep last night, and once I did, I had trouble staying asleep. Too many dreams, none of them sweet.

“I’ve been calling and calling,” Carly says. “Why didn’t you answer? Never mind. Come down and let me in.”

“Coming. By the way, nice hair,” I mumble. Carly disappears back under the porch roof. I’m about to draw back from the window when the fine hairs at my nape prickle and rise. I freeze, scanning the empty street, feeling like someone’s out there, watching me. But no one is. The only person in sight is the neighbor three doors down. She has her back to me and she’s hunched over her garden, digging. I pull the window shut as I duck back inside.

I snatch my phone. Someone turned it off. There’s a note on my nightstand that suggests that someone was Dad. I feel a moment’s panic because he made that decision for me rather than letting me choose to sleep in. A couple of deep breaths, and the panic eases. Silly. I know it’s silly to try and control every little thing, but silly or not, it’s been my instinct ever since . . . Mom.

I pick up Dad’s note.

GONE FISHING. THE SALMON’LL BE BITING. THOUGHT YOU COULD USE SOME EXTRA REST. CALL ME IF YOU NEED ME
.

DAD

He’ll text anyone and everyone else, but he leaves me handwritten notes with smiley faces at the bottom. I ought to find it annoying. Sometimes I do. But after yesterday, I appreciate the fact that even though my world’s upside down, some things don’t change. And I’m glad he’s gone fishing. He asked me if I really was okay with it so many times last night, I felt like he’d set the question on Replay. I guess he finally believed me when I told him I was fine. In the past few months, he’s been ignoring even his favorite hobbies like fly tying and fishing and bowling. Maybe this is a sign of change for the better. A girl can hope.

I turn my phone back on to find about a billion texts from people I know and people I barely know, all wanting to find out about how I saved Janice’s sister. I turn my phone off again and drag on a pair of plaid flannels and a ratty sweatshirt, then head down to let Carly in.

She kicks off her shoes, follows me to the kitchen, and sets the coffees on the counter, right beside the neat line of empty beer bottles. They’re perfectly aligned, labels pointing forward. She stares at them, saying nothing. I stare at them, trying to remember if they were there when I went up to bed last night. They weren’t. Which means Dad polished them off, all seven of them, after I went up.

He quit smoking as soon as Mom got her diagnosis. He started drinking the day we buried her. Or maybe he drank before that, and I just never noticed. Funny how so much about the way I saw my parents shriveled away right along with my mom.

Carly opens the fridge and peers inside, then runs her index finger along the tops of the bottles on the door. “Seventeen,” she says after a quick count. The number makes the tension in my shoulders ease. All bottles present and accounted for; Dad didn’t take any beer with him. I touch the rim of each empty bottle on the counter in turn. Dry. So it’s unlikely he drank them this morning. Dad pretends he doesn’t have a problem because he steers clear of hard liquor. And he swears that he’ll never drink and drive. I want to believe him, and it looks as if today I can.

Leaning one hip against the counter, Carly watches me as I put the empties in the cardboard box under the sink then wipe the counter even though it isn’t dirty. She’s waiting to see if I want to talk about it. I don’t.

But I
do
wish I could talk about what happened yesterday; I want to, so badly that the words feel like they’re clogging my throat. I usually tell Carly pretty much everything, and what I don’t tell her, she figures out for herself. Keeping something this big from her feels wrong, but Luka’s warning haunts me, and I don’t dare say a thing. Besides, how could she possibly believe me even if I did tell her? I can barely believe it, and I lived it.

“What flavor?” I ask, dipping my chin at the coffees.

“Full-fat double-shot peppermint mocha for me, plain old decaf skinny latte for you.”

I grab a couple of chocolate Pop-Tarts, keep one for myself and hand the other to Carly.

“Pop-Tarts?” she asks, one brow shooting up. I remember back to when we were like . . . nine, she practiced that look in the mirror until she felt she had it right. She’s only gotten better at it since then.