The Predicteds (14 page)

“Hey,” he says. I look over from my odd position—one leg on the floor, one leg out as I shake it all about, just like that old song from kindergarten. It's Josh Heller, wearing the same plaid shorts from that night at the diner. His red hair is expertly gelled into a perfect polygon. “Is Jan still alive?”

“How'd you know she was here?”

“Just ran into her new boyfriend. Cody. Looks like she's had a rough night.” We both glance at January lying on the floor, looking sick and miserable.

“I got it from here,” Josh says, a smirk on his lips. “You can go.”

Even though January is not really my friend, I don't want to leave her with anyone who won't make sure she gets home safely. It's the right thing to do. “I'll just wait here,” I say. “Someone is coming for her.”

“Seriously,” Josh says. “I got it.” He sits down on the ratty armchair that's positioned about three inches from a TV. “Jan's practically family.”

The thought still makes me uneasy. I'm trying to figure out what to do when January's cell rings. Josh is closer and snags it before I can. He looks at the display and hangs up, then turns off the phone and pockets it.

By this time, my leg is coming back to life, so I stand up. “Let's just get January out of here and back to her house so she can go to bed.”

“Aw, she's fine,” he says. “She's a pro at this. In fact, I bet she'll be just like this next weekend too. Right, Jan?” He gently pokes her in the side with the toe of his shoe.

“Screw you,” she whispers.

Josh abruptly turns his attention back to me. “Listen, there's something I wanted to talk to you about anyway.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yeah. I think what you did to me was totally shitty.”

His blunt tone catches me by surprise. What is he even talking about? “Me? What did I do to you?”

“Someone told my parents I pushed you into that diner window. They took away my car for a week!”

“Maybe someone was right. But how could I know? I was too busy having my head shoved through glass to see.”

“I told you—it was an accident.”

“Either way,” I said, “it's over now. Whatever.” He looked desperate for me to believe him, and even though I wasn't quite sure he was totally innocent, he also seemed genuinely upset that I'd been so hurt.

“I'd really appreciate if you didn't mention anything to Dizzy about last Friday night.”

So he
was
there when Jesse had to rescue January in the middle of the thunderstorm. “Why were you hiding?”

“I don't think it's necessary for Dizzy to know that I was with January, do you?”

I do that thing again, that thing where I think about what to say, which I can see makes Josh nervous.

“Did you tell her already?” he asks with just a hint of desperation in his voice. “Is that why she's being such a bitch?”

I take advantage of my position. “I'm sure she has plenty of things to be mad at you about. January might even be the least of them. But who knows?” The idea of Josh and January together seems almost…comical. Without warning, I accidentally conjure up a picture of her skinny arms wrapped around his freckly shoulders. Ew. Then my mind shifts to her arms around Jesse. I erase the picture quickly. “Do you really think I'm not going to tell Dizzy that you're playing her?”

He cracks his knuckles and then looks at me imploringly with his big green eyes. “I would never hurt Dizzy. I promise you. Mistakes happen, but I swear to you that I love Dizzy. I don't want to hurt her.”

There's nothing I hate more than being wrong, but I'm starting to think it's possible that I've misjudged Josh. I watch him fiddle with his broken shoelace. He reminds me of J. R., a dog that Melissa and I dog-sat for two weeks over winter break one year. I thought Melissa was going to explode when he ate her flash drive. J. R. just sat there looking penitent, like he deserved every newspaper whack she threatened him with. I have the sudden urge to scratch behind Josh's ears.

“Let me tell you how it's going to be. Whatever is going on between you and January is over,” I state. “It will not happen again. Or I
will
tell Dizzy.”

Josh holds out his hand for me to shake. “I swear, it's over. And I hope we can manage to be friends?”

“I think I can manage to avoid throttling you or tampering with your brakes,” I say.

“I'll take it,” he says. He heads for the door. I watch him clomp down the narrow stairs.

I'm still standing in front of the open door when the two vultures emerge from the end of the hallway. “Can we come in?” one of them asks.

“Ah, no. Absolutely not.” I stand with my back blocking the door.

We hear January moaning again from inside the room. “I think I'm going to die,” she says.

“Aw, come on,” the taller one says. “We just want to hang out with y'all.”

I cross my arms and stand with my feet apart, as if I'm a military guard. “No chance,” I tell them. “This room is off limits.”

“Pretty please?” the shorter one says, and he leans forward until his elbow is resting on the door frame.

“Just for a minute?” the other says, and then he leans in on the other side of the frame. I feel trapped with both of them breathing on me. They smell like beer and cigarette smoke.

“Come in,” January says weakly from behind the door.

I turn around and yell, “No!” at her.

“Hey,” a voice from the stairway calls. “Daphne!” We all turn to see Jesse standing there. “I tried to call you back,” he tells me, “but I got Jan's voice mail. Where is she? Why do you have her phone?” He walks toward the three of us and between the two guys, who are both smaller than he is. They move away from me. “The guy downstairs wouldn't let me in. He said the kegs are dry. No more guys allowed. I had to sneak in.”

The Sigma guys are still standing there dumbly, so Jesse turns to them, “Don't you all have someplace to be?” They nod and move toward the stairs. “Jerks,” Jesse murmurs. “I hate frat boys.”

Jesse is wearing dark jeans with a tight black shirt. Over that, he's wrapped in a roomy leather jacket, even though it's pretty warm outside. He looks different—older, sadder, less Oklahoma. Sexier. A little bit scary.

“I thought you were sick,” I say to him. He touches my cheek, but I move away. I haven't forgotten about the cafeteria debacle. “We've got to get her home.”

January has managed to sit up on the bottom bunk, and she looks miserable. “I look like hell,” she mumbles glumly and only somewhat coherently. Maybe she really said something else. But
I look like hell
would have been appropriate.

“What happened?” Jesse asks me.

“I found her here drunk, halfway unconscious, and pretty much a sitting duck with those frat boy Neanderthals looking for someone to take advantage of.”

Jesse turns to January. “Janny,” he says sadly, “Why do you do this to yourself?”

“Y'all know why,” she says. “PROFILE.” They look at me as if it's my fault that Melissa's stupid scientific advancement is ruining people's lives. She'll probably win a Nobel Prize, and I'll spend prom night organizing my sock drawer. I hang my head.

Jesse helps January off the bed. She leans over like a rag doll, and he practically has to carry her under his arm. “Come on, Jan. I'll take you home.”

I reach the end of the narrow stairs first. Jesse descends awkwardly behind me with January attached to him, and I immediately catch sight of Dizzy. She is standing near the banister, dancing by herself, a weird little disco/riverdance that makes her look a tiny bit spastic. When she sees me, she yells, “There you are! I've been looking all over for you. Let's go. I'm starving. Let's get pizza or something.”

Josh is standing near her. He moves closer and puts his arm on her shoulders. She purses her lips and says in a baby voice to him, “I just might let you come along, Mister.” When she sees Jesse, her tone changes. “Oh, who invited him?”

Jesse is still slowly hauling January down the stairs. He stops and looks at Dizzy. “I'm sorry about that day in the cafeteria. I shouldn't have said that to you.”

Dizzy turns her nose up in the air. “Whatever,” she says. “I don't care.”

“And,” Jesse says, turning to me, “I owe you an apology too. For everything.” His forehead wrinkles as he looks at my foot. “I don't know what to say.”

“We're cool,” I say calmly, although I feel something else. I feel…sad. Like I've lost something I never quite had.

“I got this,” Jesse tells us all, pointing at January. “Y'all go. Have a good time.”

“Sure,” Dizzy says brightly. She looks at me. “You better drive.”

“Go on,” Jesse says to me, as if I'm waiting for his permission. Now I'm really annoyed.

I ignore him and look at January, who smiles weakly at me. “I owe you,” she says. Her eyes focus for just a second, and in them, I see something calculating, a glinting glow that tells me she's plotting. And then, in just a millisecond, her eyes glaze over again. She droops into Jesse's arms, a pile of bones and skin and alcohol-curdled blood.

“Thank you for doing this for her,” I say coldly and formally to Jesse. I nod in January's direction. He moves her away from him gently, and she grabs hold of Dizzy like she's a drowning woman.

Dizzy staggers backward. Jesse leans into my ear and whispers, “I did this for you too.” His lips brush my cheek, and I feel a shiver run through me.

I shake it off quickly. “Please,” I say loudly. “How dumb do you think I am?”

Even Dizzy looks surprised. “Whoa, Daph,” she says. Josh moves closer—he doesn't want to miss this. He smacks his fists together.

“Come off it, Jesse. I'm not an idiot. It's pretty clear that you don't have much time for anyone but January.”

January tries to speak, but Dizzy tells her to shut it.

“Daphne,” Jesse says softly, looking around him. He wants Josh and Dizzy gone. “Can we talk about this later? Alone?”

“I really can't see that there's anything to talk about.”

Josh laughs obnoxiously, enjoying every second. “Shut up,” I say without even looking at him. “Nobody wants to hear from you, Josh. Come on, Dizz,” I say. “You must be hungry.”

Dizzy grabs my hand. “We don't need them,” she says, nodding at Jesse and January.

“Of course not,” I respond with enthusiasm that sounds false even to me, but I forge ahead. “Hope you and January have a great night.” I wave at Jesse with two bitchy fingers. “And please don't call me,” I add.

“Yes, don't call us,” Dizzy says as if she is an extension of me.

“Ladies,” Josh says, putting one gross arm around me and the other on Dizzy. “I think we have a threesome.”

I manage simultaneously to not vomit and walk out the side door without a backward glance at Jesse.

I remember Melissa's first rule of science: Always go with your gut. Unless your gut is wrong. Not a very helpful maxim, actually.

And what happens when your guts are a twisted heap of anger and indecision and confusion and false hope?

And maybe even love?

Each student will receive his or her PROFILE report in the mail prior to the public announcement. We ask that individuals refrain from sharing their status until we have time to adequately prepare everyone for the news.

—Mrs. LeAnn Temple, principal of Quiet High

He is a person of interest. That is true. But let me be clear: he has not been charged with anything. At this time.

—David Witt, chief of Quiet City Police

I wake up before dawn with the kind of headache that starts within your skull and radiates throughout your entire body. Little electrical pulses of pain shoot from my cranium to the bones in my toes. I lie awake for a long time curled up with my head under the blanket. I must eventually drift back to sleep, because the next thing I know, I'm back there. Back at school. I am right back in that cupboard again, folded away, hidden from the dark shadow pointing a gun at me. When I wake up, I feel like I'm suffocating. My heart is racing, my ears stinging from someone screaming loudly.

“What?” Melissa comes running into the room. “What in the world is wrong?” She pulls the covers down from over my head. I blink my eyes. It takes me a second to realize that I'm the one screaming.

Melissa is smoothing my hair down now. “What's wrong, Daph? Are you sick?”

I'm embarrassed. “Just a bad a dream,” I say, shrugging it off. “No big deal.” I lift the edge of my bedroom blinds and peer out at the street. It's long past sunrise, but the day is so gray and soupy that the streetlights are still on. Rain drools from the ominous clouds. “Ick,” I say.

When the phone rings, both Melissa and I jump. I pick up the handset next to my bed.

“They found her.” It's Dizzy.

“Found who?” I ask. Melissa is still sitting with me. I motion for her to go, but she doesn't move.

“January.”

“She was lost?” I shoo Melissa again, and this time, she gets up and leaves—reluctantly.

“There's bad news.”

“Dizzy, what's going on?”

“I don't know if I should tell you.”

“Then why did you call?” I say impatiently.

“Daphne, listen to me. I have to tell you something.”

I rub my head, squint my eyes, and sigh heavily. I just want to take a long shower, eat some breakfast, and then go back to bed. “What?”

“Someone attacked her last night. When she didn't come home, they called the police. The cops found her early this morning.”

“Oh, my gosh,” I say, sounding like my grandmother. I don't know what else to say. “Is she all right? What happened?” I ask quietly, but Melissa's radar hearing hones in anyway.

“What's wrong?” she says, coming back to my bedroom.

I mouth,
January
.

“Who?” Melissa says. I ignore her.

Dizzy is so excited, she can barely form words. It takes a minute until she can pull herself together enough to talk. “She's alive. But she was beaten pretty badly. She's in the hospital.”

“What happened?” I ask, sitting at the edge of the bed.

Melissa crouches next to me, pushing her ear into the receiver. “What?” she whispers to me. I shake my head but move closer to let her hear.

“They don't know who attacked her.”

“She was attacked? What does that mean?”

“Yes. Attacked. Beaten half to death.”

“But Jesse took her home.”

“She didn't
get
home.” And then Dizzy erupts into dramatic sobs, which only sound about one percent genuine.

Melissa takes the phone from me. “Dizzy?” she says kindly and patiently. “Dizzy, what's going on?” She sounds far more tolerant than she ever does with me.

Melissa listens a long time, nodding her head periodically. Then she turns to me. “January is sedated now. There's nothing we can do except wait.”

“Dizzy, let me talk to your mom.” Melissa stands up and moves to my desk chair.

I stay sitting on the edge of my bed, my face in my hands, trying to take it all in. January? Attacked? I think of those scummy frat boys, hanging around outside of the room.
Drunk slut in that room
, they'd said, as if they'd found an old sofa in someone's garbage heap—free for the taking. You can have it if you can carry it. She was beaten badly, Dizzy said. What else happened to her? I wonder. And then I think about Jesse. Was he hurt too? He was with her when she left.

I hear the soothing hum of Melissa's voice on the phone, talking to Dizzy's mother. She lets out an endless string of
um-hum
s and
eh-heh
s, until she thanks Dizzy's mom and I hear this: “No, I have never been to a home candle party. Sounds fun.” She makes a face at me. “I'll be sure to do that. Thank you…No, thank
you
…Okay, now…Take care of Dizzy. Bye.” She hangs up.

“I think we should go to the hospital,” I say.

***

“I didn't realize that you were so close to January,” Melissa says in the car.

I'm not,
I want to reply, but I don't, because I can't even explain to myself what I am feeling and why. Sure, it's normal to feel bad and scared when someone has been attacked and beaten badly enough to be in the hospital. But there's something else—something else nagging at me that I'm not ready to name or even admit. The terror I feel radiating to the ends of all my limbs is intensifying, and all I know is that something is terribly wrong. All I want to do is see January.

Melissa drops me off at the double doors while she finds parking. I'm too distracted to appreciate the fact that she agreed to drive rather than walk the three miles to Quiet Regional Medical Center. The person at the front desk won't tell me which room January is in, but I must look pitiful, because she reaches across her desk to pat my forearm and tells me that I can find family and friends in the third-floor waiting room. I take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, feeling more worried as I climb each step.

Jesse is in the waiting room, sitting alone in a chair, staring at a blank television screen. He looks up and sees me, motioning for me to sit next to him. “I'm glad you're here.” He grabs both of my hands. I let him, though my initial urge is to move away from him. “This is all just so surreal,” he says.

“What happened?”

He swallows hard and shakes his head back and forth, his eyes fixed on a point just to the right of my head. It feels like he is signaling,
No, no, no, no
to a phantom person standing behind me. “You guys left the party,” he finally says. I nod. We had. We'd all left together—Dizzy and me and Josh. We'd walked to my car, and I'd driven us all to Pizza Hut, where we split a large pepperoni—a greasy lump that I can still feel in the bottom of my stomach.

“I left her in the kitchen. She was sitting in a chair, drinking a glass of water. And she looked better. She looked alert, and she was talking. And I asked this girl to keep an eye on her while I ran to get my car.” I nod again. Parking is impossible in that neighborhood, with all the narrow one-way streets and college kids who leave their old junkers in any available space. Jesse would've had to park in the library lot, blocks away, just like we did. “I got the car, pulled up front, and ran inside—not five minutes after I left her—and she was gone. The girl—the girl who was watching her—was still there, and she said January went to the bathroom. I looked all over that house, but she was gone. I drove around looking for her. I couldn't find her.”

“Maybe she was in someone's room.” I'm thinking of shirtless Cody. “Has anyone talked to that snake Cody? Did you go upstairs?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Why didn't you tell anyone she was missing?”

“I should have,” he says, dropping my hands and punching his palm with his fist. “I should have, but after I drove all over town half the night, I just figured, you know, that she'd turn up. That she was probably off with some guy she met.”

“And you're sick of being her babysitter?”

He doesn't answer. He just leans back heavily in his chair, pushing it away from me. “I just decided, you know, to let her be. Let her take care of herself for once. But I should've done something.” He lowers his head. I get up and lean over him, toying with the idea of putting my arms around him. “I didn't dare call the house and risk getting her mom. Her mom freaks out over everything.”

“Did anybody see her leave? At the party, while you were getting your car?”

“By the time I got back, the kitchen was pretty much empty. Everybody was probably in the hot tub or something. I don't know. I checked rooms upstairs.”

“I thought you said you didn't check rooms.”

“No, I
did
check,” he says sharply. I drop the subject. He's probably confused. Why would he lie about something like that?

“Do they know what happened? Do you know?”

“Nobody knows,” he says. “They found her out by the abandoned train car. Somebody beat her with a baseball bat or a piece of wood or something. They just left her there.”

I gasp in spite of myself. I just can't fathom someone attacking another human being like that, no matter how many times I hear that it actually happens. “Was she…?” I don't know how to say the word
raped
. It's too awful to even say.

Jesse shakes his head. “No.”

“Is she going to be okay? Did she see who did it?”

Jesse shakes his head. “That's the thing. She doesn't remember anything at all. The last thing she remembers is the frat party. She's going to be okay, but it's going to take a while. She has a lot of bruises and a couple broken bones, but nothing that won't heal. Fortunately, the bastard who did this was either really weak, or he lost his nerve. It could've been worse. She's going to be fine.
Physically
fine.”

“Good,” I say, but it doesn't feel so good. “It had to be someone who was predicted,” I add hopefully. “That's how they'll find the guy. They just need to look at the predicteds.” My voice rises. “That's what they'll do, I bet. Don't worry,” I tell Jesse, “this will be over as soon as they look at that list, right? It could very well be someone who has been PROFILEd. Melissa says they have a lot of names on file. They'll get the guy, right?”

He nods at me, giving me a weak smile. “Right,” he says.

He wraps his arms around me, holding me tight. I let him. I squeeze my eyes shut against his shoulder, the cotton of his red T-shirt rubbing soft on my cheek. I inhale spring-rain scented fabric softener.

“I'm going to get a coffee,” Melissa says loudly, to no one in particular. She apparently came into the waiting room after parking the car.

When we can no longer hear her footsteps, Jesse pulls away and looks me in the eyes. “There's something more I need to tell you—something I need to explain. Before you hear it from someone else.”

“You don't have to explain anything to me,” I say quickly. But he does. Once and for all, I want to know what's going between him and January. I reach up and touch his face, his cool, smooth skin sending electric shocks through my fingertips. But I don't want to know right now. “Don't talk,” I tell him, moving my lips to his.

He sighs intensely as soon as we touch. We kiss deeply and tenderly for what seems like a long time. I forget that we are in the middle of a hospital waiting room until he speaks and I come crashing back to reality. “Daphne,” he says, his lips fluttering against mine, “I can't.” He pulls away from me and raises his hands to either side of my head, smoothing my undoubtedly un-smooth hair. “You're going to hear things about me.”

“No,” I say, trying to shake my head, but Jesse holds his hands firmly.

“Listen to me,” he says quietly. “By tomorrow, everyone will know. Everyone will be talking about me. And about—about what happened to…” He's stuttering and stopping, completely stripped of the cool confidence that he usually has. “…about what…happened to January.”

I know with sudden certainty—a certainty I've never felt about anything before—what he is telling me. It explains why he acted that way in the cafeteria. He wasn't reacting to Dizzy's rant about January. He's not in love with January. He meant it when he said that nothing happened between them. Why didn't I see this before? This isn't about how he feels about her. It's about how he feels about himself. I raise my hand to my mouth, my fingers touching my raw lips, all the lip gloss long kissed off.

Jesse is predicted.

“I got the letter in the mail last week.”

“No,” I reply, because I don't know what else to say.

Jesse casts his eyes downward. “It's true. I wish it weren't.” He meets my gaze, his dark eyes glazing over as if he is retreating far into himself. “Daphne, you have to be ready for what people are going to be saying about me.

I say nothing, but I must look stricken. “Honey,” a passing nurse says to me, part concerned mother, part nosy health care professional, “are you okay?” she asks, her drawn-on eyebrows, red like clay, making an alarmed arch on her forehead. She rubs my back. “What's going on?”

What am I supposed to say ?
Sorry, I've just found out that this guy right here has a negative PROFILE, which means he may have brutally attacked someone, this utter mess of a girl who I was honestly jealous of. Because, you see, I thought I was in love with him.

I say none of that. Instead, I say to the nurse, in a voice that sounds foreign to me, “I'm totally fine, thanks.” I say it brightly and cheerfully, a friendly answer better suited to a different question.
Do you want a coffee? I'm totally fine, thanks. Do you need a tissue, dear? I'm totally fine, thanks.

For a second, I think I'm going to cry while six eyes watch: Jesse's, the concerned nurse's, and another nurse's—the younger one, with moles all down her neck. She stands off to the side, stage right, watching me with her head cocked in curiosity. I rub at my eyes experimentally. Nothing happens. There are no tears. A tidal wave runs through my stomach, the aftershocks worse than the initial disaster. I want to scream—to freak out—but I'm strangely frozen, a version of myself I didn't know existed. “Good-bye,” says the voice of this other Daphne. “Good luck,” she says without a trace of emotion.