Shades of Simon Gray (11 page)

“He could come out of the coma any day, any minute, for that matter,” Danny said.

Earlier that morning, as they plowed the Lehmans’ driveway, Kyle had told Danny about how he and Devin had sneaked into Simon’s room the night before. Now he looked over at Danny and shook his head. “You wouldn’t think so if you’d seen him last night.”

Danny considered this. Was Kyle saying that Simon wasn’t going to recover? It wasn’t that this thought hadn’t occurred to him before. He just preferred not to think about it. “You know, even if Simon does come out of the coma and the cops grill him, I don’t think he’ll talk,” he told Kyle. Danny desperately needed to convince himself that this was true. Simon considered them his friends. He was the kind of guy who would take the blame for all of them if it came down to it.

“You about done with that thing?” Kyle said. He pointed to Danny’s hot dog. “I’ve got to get home and study for a math test tomorrow.”

Danny picked up the half-eaten hot dog, decided he wasn’t hungry, and dropped it back on the plate. “Study?”

“We’re on our own right now, remember?” Kyle stood and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. “If my grades slip, I can forget Harvard.”

Danny nodded and followed Kyle out the door, although he didn’t see what Kyle was worried about. Even
with “the project,” Kyle studied hard; he had top scores on his SATs. He would probably have gotten into Harvard without Simon’s help. He just wasn’t taking any chances. Danny was beginning to feel a little queasy about this college business himself. If he didn’t keep his grades up through the rest of the year, there was a good chance the admissions directors at Dartmouth would change their minds.

Recently, he had begun to wonder what he would do when he got to Dartmouth. Because once he was there, once classes started in the fall, there wouldn’t be any Simon Gray to steal passwords to help him get into the system, to help him get copies of exams in advance.

If he thought about this for too long he would begin to panic. Instead, he told himself there would be other Simons, probably a whole bunch of computer geeks just ripe for the picking. If you pushed all the right buttons—and he’d watched Kyle do that for three years now, first with Walter, then Simon—you could get them to show off what they could do.

One of the crows lifted off a mound of snow and landed on the hood of Danny’s Jeep. It paraded back and forth in front of the windshield. He leaned out the window and shouted, “Stupid-ass bird. You scratch the paint on my dad’s Jeep and you’re history.” When the bird continued to pace, Danny jumped out of the Jeep and swatted it so hard it landed in a snowbank, stunned but still breathing.

He turned to look at Kyle, who was staring through the
windshield at the crow. “We can’t leave everything to chance,” Kyle told him.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning if Simon comes out of that coma, we can’t just assume he won’t talk. We should have a plan, in case things don’t go our way.”

Danny turned the key in the ignition but made no attempt to back out of the parking space. “What kind of plan?” Judging by the expression on Kyle’s face, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted an answer to this question. But Kyle only shrugged and turned his face away to look out the side window. All he said was “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

D
EVIN HELD UP A LIME GREEN SWEATER FOR
L
IZ’S
consideration. After walking the mile to Route 40 and catching the bus to the mall, they were rummaging through one of the sales tables at the Gap. Devin couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she’d asked Liz to go to the mall. It wasn’t like they were friends or anything. Vaguely, she wondered if it had something to do with Simon, then pushed the thought to the back of her mind.

“The color’s not bad,” Liz told her. “For you, anyway.”

Devin didn’t miss Liz’s indifference. What was she doing asking Liz Shapiro, of all people, for her opinion on clothes? The girl hardly ever wore anything that wasn’t black, except for blue jeans once in a while. Devin doubted Liz had any color sense at all. And it was obvious
shopping was the last thing on Liz’s mind. Devin felt the same way. She was just killing time until … what? Until the police found hard evidence on Simon’s computer or one of the computers at school? Until she and the others were caught and forced into a confession? Until one of them cracked and they all turned themselves in? She tried not to laugh at this last image. It was so B-movie melodramatic.

All the bright summer colors—bold violet, tangerine, daffodil yellow—under the glare of the fluorescent lights were making her dizzy. Her eyes hurt. One side of her head had begun to throb. She thought she might be getting a migraine.

“I’m going to try it on,” Devin said and headed for the dressing room. She didn’t even like the sweater and knew she wasn’t going to buy it. But for some reason she needed to get away from the harsh lights and all those customers who were digging through the neatly stacked piles of new tank tops and tees. She needed someplace to be alone, someplace to think.

Inside the dressing room she tossed the sweater on the bench and stared down at it. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely take a breath, as if she’d been running nonstop for miles. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror, eyes wide, her skin so pale and taut with tension that fine blue veins had appeared above her brow. Her mass of red hair was still tangled from the icy wind outside. She didn’t know this girl at all, this stranger, this crazy person, staring back at her.

Until the day before, she had been able to hold on to
some thin thread of hope, the belief that somehow they would all get through this unscathed, that Kyle would never let them get caught and Simon would never be so stupid as to leave evidence behind, especially on his computer. People committed crimes all the time and never got caught. Why should she and the others be any different?

Suddenly she found herself wishing Simon were there. She missed him and that surprised her. If he’d been there, he would have put his arm around her shoulders and reassured her with that funny half-cocked smile of his. He would have given the ends of her hair a light tug. He’d have said, “McCafferty, you’re getting all uptight over nothing.”

Am I?
she wondered.

Devin took several deep breaths and tried to calm down. The night before at the hospital, when she and Kyle had sneaked into Simon’s room, it had been all she could do not to scream out loud when she saw him lying there, so exposed and vulnerable.

She and Kyle had waited for almost a half hour to find an unobtrusive way to enter the intensive care unit. They had discovered that the only way in was to press a large circular plate outside the heavy metal double doors leading into the unit. A large sign was posted on one of the doors:
Immediate Family Only
. After they’d watched one of the doctors press the plate and heard the clatter of the doors opening, they knew the noise would draw attention to anyone who tried to enter.

Finally, they had followed a man and woman into the ICU who were obviously there to visit someone. As soon
as the doors thumped open, Devin and Kyle did a quick survey of the large room, a surprisingly cheerful place with pale mauve walls and a flowered border that ran along the top, right below the ceiling. On the left were rooms, only one of which had the curtain drawn across the glass wall. The others appeared to be unoccupied.

The first station, presumably for the administrative assistants, was empty. The second, farther back in the room, appeared to be the nurses’ station. Only two nurses were on duty, and they were busy talking with the man and woman who had just entered the room.

Kyle nudged Devin and tipped his head toward the second room on the left, the one with the partially pulled curtain. He slid the glass door to the side and the two of them slipped into the room.

Devin was glad Simon’s room wasn’t on the other side of the nurses’ station. They would have never been able to pull this off.

With the curtain closed over the single window and the curtain pulled across most of the glass wall, dimming the glare of the fluorescent lights from the main room, Devin could barely make out the form on the bed. Simon’s face was bruised and swollen. He looked so different that at first Devin thought they had the wrong room. The person lying in the bed barely resembled the boy who had become such an indispensable cog in their crooked wheel. She grabbed the cold metal side rail and held on so tightly both hands turned waxy white.

If the nurse hadn’t shown up at that moment and ushered them back through the double doors, Devin might
have bolted right out of the room on her own. The sight of Simon was far worse than she had imagined.

But there had been a single moment, while Kyle attempted to charm the nurse into letting them stay, when Devin had managed to unglue her hand from the metal bar and rest it on Simon’s. “Simon,” she whispered. “I miss you.” And then she and Kyle were brusquely escorted back to the waiting room.

Kyle stood in the middle of the cramped room, his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants, staring at the hospital’s mission statement posted on the wall, looking thoughtful. Devin, not realizing he wasn’t behind her, was already halfway down the hall, heading for the front lobby before she noticed. And she would have kept on going, Kyle or no Kyle, if she hadn’t made a wrong turn, ending up in another ward. As she stood in the hall, trying to get her bearings, images of Simon lying in that hospital bed came crashing down on her. He was going to die. Anyone could see that. No one who looked that bad could be expected to survive.

This was all their fault, hers and Kyle’s and Danny’s. They should never have dragged him into “the project.” He didn’t have Walter Tate’s devious nature.

Another, more disturbing thought came to her. What if Simon had been so upset about the possibility of an investigation, terrified of what would happen to his reputation, that he had run into the Hanging Tree on purpose? That was when Devin began to sob uncontrollably. She could not stop shaking. Simon was going to die and there was nothing she could do about it.

Kyle rounded the corner just as a concerned nurse came running from behind her station. Kyle put his arm around Devin and steered her away from the oncoming woman.

“Jeez, Dev. What the hell is wrong with you?” he said, keeping his voice low.

“Simon,” she told him between sobs. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

“He’s not going to die, okay? Get a grip, for god’s sake.”

As soon as they reached the lobby Kyle said, “Nothing like making a scene so they’ll be sure to remember us here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He fumbled in his pocket for his car keys as they stepped through the automatic sliding doors leading outside. “It’s not what I’d call keeping a low profile.”

Devin was too exhausted and shaken from seeing Simon to argue with Kyle. Still, she wondered, as she often found herself doing these days, what she had ever seen in Kyle. Sometimes she marveled that they had been together for almost four years.

Someone was tapping lightly on the louvered door to the dressing room. Liz’s voice floated into the cramped space.

“Devin? Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

“You’ve been in there twenty minutes. How long does it take to try on one sweater?”

Devin drew a long breath. “I can’t decide whether to buy it or not.”

“So put it back on the table. We can come back later if you still want it.”

Before she realized what was happening, Devin was sliding down the wall of the dressing room. She landed on her backside, knees up against her chest. She couldn’t seem to get up.

“Can I come in?” Liz asked. Her voice sounded cautious. It was obvious she knew something was wrong. When Devin didn’t respond, Liz tried the doorknob but found the door locked. Below was an open space of about one foot. She peeked under the door, then got down on her hands and knees and scooted underneath. She leaned against the wall across from Devin, her back against the mirror. “So, what? Do you want to go home?”

Home
. Devin closed her eyes. All these years she had been looking forward to the moment when she could leave the crowded Cape Cod house on Meadowlark Drive, when she would share a room with only one other person, not two, when she wouldn’t have to elbow out eight other people plus her grandparents for a fried chicken breast. And now it seemed that in ways she had never expected, she had already left. The Devin who walked through the back door that night would not be the same girl who’d left the house late that morning, would never be the same girl. It was almost, she thought, as if everything that had come before had suddenly been canceled out. This was what was left, this panicked pale face in the mirror, a face she couldn’t even bring herself to look at.

Liz leaned forward. Gently she placed a warm reassuring
hand on Devin’s. “Come on. We’ll leave, okay? The bus should be outside in about ten minutes.”

But Devin had begun to cry. Tears snaked streaks of mascara down her cheeks. And there was nothing Liz could do but wait.