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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

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Oddly, though, he seemed truly taken with the idea. “No—the more the merrier. We’ve all been shut up for so long, and people have been so good to us. I need to repay everyone somehow. Why not a backyard party? Easter would give us time, right?”
She was wondering who he meant by
us.
Maybe he meant himself and his family. Or was he including her? “I guess.”
“I need to start figuring this out.” He got up and was already drifting away, lost in thought. In plans. Halfway to his own house, he stopped.
“You looked beautiful today, Grace,” he said, as if it was both a matter of fact and a consolation.
And strangely enough, coming from him, it was.
31
H
ELL TO
P
AY
J
ordan jabbed paint on the canvas in front of her, distracted by the herd of emotions charging around her head. She didn’t know why she bothered painting at all—sometimes the futility of it overwhelmed her. She wasn’t going to San Francisco. She wished now she hadn’t sent in her application to the program; it would be sickening if they rejected her, and even worse if she got accepted and couldn’t go.
It had been a bad week. First had come Lily’s treachery and their dad telling her that she couldn’t go to California this summer. Then, after she’d bricked her last algebra test, she’d gone to talk to the teacher, Mr. Witt, ready to beg, plead, bribe—anything to encourage him to nudge her test grade from an F to a D. But after she’d blurted out her sob story—she was so busy, was still having problems adjusting to all the changes in her life, blah, blah, blah—Mr. Witt had frowned down at his desk for a moment, his mouth tensing into a flat line so that his lips disappeared.
“Part of my job as a teacher, especially as a teacher of mathematics, is to emphasize logic. And a large part of logic, unfortunately, is that actions have consequences.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Actions have consequences.”
As if she of all people didn’t know that!
Mr. Witt wasn’t going to change her grade. She was going to fail.
She looked at her painting, which wasn’t coming out the way she wanted. She had found a silly little collapsible wooden toy on the kitchen counter and had intended to do a still life of it for an art project. But the little black-and-white cow with its flat features and segmented legs was proving to be a tougher subject than she’d expected.
There was a knock at the door and Dominic poked his head in. “What are you doing?” he yelled over her music.
She turned it down a hair.
He stepped in, nose wrinkling. “It stinks in here.”
Jordan loved the smell of oils. If some company were to bottle it, she’d buy it. But there was Buns to consider, hunched in his cage in the corner. Buns was practically her best friend now. She didn’t want the poor guy to asphyxiate. She walked over to pry open a window.
Dominic gawped at the canvas. “Grace’s cow!”
She was taken aback. “Grace’s? I found it in the kitchen.”
He picked up the model. “Yeah . . . I sort of took it. Grace has a whole lot of these. She calls them push puppets.”
“What does she do with them?”
He shrugged and put it back as it had been. “I dunno. They just sit on her desk, mostly.”
What little enthusiasm she had for her painting waned now that she knew where her model had come from. But she had to keep going; she hated not finishing stuff.
Dominic crossed his arms. “Do you want to go do something?”
“I’m sort of busy here, Nickel,” she said, distracted. “What’s going on next door?”
“They’re not home,” he muttered, trudging back toward the door. “They went to Houston.”
“Why?”
“So Professor Oliver can see a specialist.”
“Is he sick?”
“Not really
sick.
He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
Jordan straightened and looked over at him. “Seriously?”
He rattled the doorknob restlessly. “That’s what Lily told me. Why?”
“Because that’s
really awful,”
Jordan said.
Dominic frowned and kept on rattling the doorknob. “Really? He seems okay to me.”
She turned back to look at her cow and shook her head. “Now, maybe. But people with Alzheimer’s really lose it. Their brains turn to mush. Maggie Burton’s grandmom had Alzheimer’s and according to Maggie she basically just sat around drooling in a nursing home until she died.”
“Yeah, but Professor Oliver’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad
yet,
maybe,” Jordan said. “It’s like one of the worst things that can happen to you.” Poor old geezer.
“Oh,” Dominic said.
“You didn’t hear the phone ring, did you?” she asked him.
“No,” he said.
She was hoping Heather would want to go out. But the truth was, the last couple of times Jordan had called Heather, she’d sort of blown her off.
She turned to ask Dominic where Lily was—it helped to keep track of her so she could avoid her altogether—but Dominic was already gone. She went back to painting, but the mere thought of Lily made her so hopping mad she couldn’t concentrate. Lily, the life ruiner.
She should have wrung her scrawny neck when she’d told Jordan that she was jealous of her and Nina. Jealous, of Lily! What a pathetic delusion that was. Lily didn’t know squat about Nina. Just because Nina talked to her about books, and because Lily was willing to let her whack tennis balls at her and talk her into doing goofy crafty stuff like making elaborate costumes for character day at school—all the junk Nina did that had seemed like a total waste of time to Jordan—Lily assumed they had been best buds. But that was nothing compared to the bond Jordan had had with Nina. Nina had meant everything to her, and then when Lily got older she started butting in, and . . .
Jordan’s eyes started to water, and she wrenched her cell phone from its charger on the floor by the bed to check for messages. Nothing from Heather, or anybody. She felt all alone in the world.
She flopped onto her bed and thought about dyeing her hair pink.
But what did it matter? She had no future to need pink hair for. She was either going to spend her summer working at McDonald’s or repeating Algebra II in summer school. And no one was ever going to call her again, evidently.
She heard something from down below and got up to look out the window. Her dad and Lily were dragging the lawn furniture around. Oh, yeah. She’d heard Lily telling their dad this morning that she’d
love
to help him spray paint the lawn furniture. Little Miss Suck-up. Their dad had turned manic recently. It was weird. He’d latched on to the idea of having a big party in the backyard, and now he was always trying to get them involved.
Jordan flipped off her music, grabbed her bike messenger bag, and left the house.
At first she didn’t know where she was going, but she found herself on the bus headed for Heather’s apartment. She dug through her bag for her cell phone, but then she remembered that she’d put it back in its charger. Damn. But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t dropped in on Heather before. As long as she brought a treat, Heather was always happy to see her.
She got off the bus a stop early so she could go to the 7-Eleven. In the store, she looked around for something Heather would like. Chips were always good, but this day cried out for super comfort food. She finally settled on a box of Little Debbie Star Crunches and a giant bottle of Dr Pepper.
Humidity hung thick in the air, and by the time she made it to Heather’s she was hot, sticky, and tired. She was just stepping into the complex’s driveway when the door to Heather’s apartment opened and Heather walked out, followed by some guy.
They both stopped in midstep when they saw Jordan. Neither of them looked thrilled to see her.
“Oh, hey,” Heather said, smiling but without much enthusiasm. “Clint, this is Jordan. You know . . . the kid I told you about.”
Kid?
The unspoken desire between them to get rid of her was palpable. Clint’s hair, she noticed now, was sleeked down and wet. Like he’d just taken a shower. Now that she thought about it, Heather’s cornrows seemed sort of damp, too. Her hair was usually so oily and skanky that water tended to roll right off her head, so it was hard to tell. But clearly something of an intimate nature had occurred.
Hoping she was hiding the flush in her cheeks, Jordan said, “So y’all are going somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Clint said. “There’s a thing.”
“I love things,” Jordan said.
Heather rushed in. “It’s kind of an adult thing.”
Jordan let out a humorless laugh. “What—a porn party?”
Heather rolled her eyes. “No, but you know. There’ll be lots of alcohol. And adults.”
“Oh, and I’ve never been around those before,” Jordan said sarcastically.
Clint let out a nervous chuckle. “It’s just . . .”
“Yeah, I get it.” It was just that they didn’t want her there. She lifted her head. “Never mind. I just came by to hang out.”
Heather looked down at the bag. “Oh—and you brought stuff. Sweet! You can leave it here if you want.”
“No, I think I’ll take it home. I need a sugar rush now. I had a sort of crappy week.”
She hadn’t even seen Heather since learning she wasn’t going to get to go to San Francisco. She had left her a message, but Heather hadn’t called back. Hadn’t even texted. Which was perfect—her life had been ruined because she’d gone to some stupid club with Heather, and now Heather was making her feel like a pariah.
“Aw, suck-ass,” Clint said sympathetically.
“But that’s what being in high school is all about, isn’t it, kiddo?” Heather asked. “Learning to deal with crap.”
Kiddo?
Heather glanced at her watch. “You need us to drop you at the bus?”
She didn’t even rate a ride home anymore, apparently.
“No, thanks.” Face blazing with embarrassment, Jordan walked back to the corner and didn’t even acknowledge them when they cruised by in Clint’s truck. While she was on the bus she realized she was dying of thirst. She opened up the two-liter plastic jug of Dr Pepper and started swigging it. The woman sitting next to her changed seats.
Screw Heather, Jordan fumed. She didn’t care if she never saw her again. Only, she wasn’t going to give her Buns back. Heather had been talking about giving Buns to the Humane Society anyway.
Forsake your rabbit, forsake your friends.
Why hadn’t she seen it coming?
After she’d made her way back to the house, she realized that barely an hour had passed. Sixty minutes that had resulted in her life getting even worse. Lily and their dad were still in the backyard, and Dominic was in the living room, laid out on the couch like something half dead.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him.
He groaned. “I ate five bowls of cereal. One right after the other.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I was worried about what you’d said about Professor Oliver.”
“That’s no reason!”
But she felt a stab of guilt as she wedged herself between his feet and the edge of the couch. She’d said that about Maggie’s grandmom without thinking.
He looked at the plastic carrier bag in her hand. “What did you get?”
She remembered that she was wagging around a dose of sugar solace too. “Little Debbies.”
He sat up. “Can I have one?”
“No! You’ll hurl, Nickel.”
“Star Crunches are my favorite.”
She remembered what he and Lily had said about her—that she treated Dominic like a puppy. It would be easy to give him a treat and walk away, to go upstairs and wallow some more in her own woe. But she couldn’t. She was so depressed, but when she looked into Dominic’s round eyes, she felt a weird jolt. Like maybe she wasn’t
totally
alone after all. And hadn’t been, ever.
“Let’s go a movie,” she said.
He tilted his head. “You can’t drive.”
“So?”
“Nina used to say that when she learned to drive, she’d take me to the movies.”
Yeah, Jordan remembered that. It was Nina’s leverage with their mom for taking driver’s ed and getting her learner’s permit as soon as she legally could. She’d promised she would help hauling the kids around. She probably would have, too.
Now for a whole year, no one had hauled Dominic and Lily anywhere.
“Well, we’ll take a bus,” she said. “There are a couple of theaters we can get to that way, easy. I’ll go check the Internet.”
Dominic hopped up, then stopped. “Shouldn’t we ask Dad first?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah—I guess so. Except maybe you should do it. And tell him it’s Pixar.”
“What is?”
“The movie we’re going to see.”
“What
are
we going to see?”
“I don’t know. Just tell him it’s a cartoon thing. That way he won’t think I’m going to drag you off to watch
Deep Throat.”
His eyes widened. “Is that a slasher movie?”
“Just say Pixar,” Jordan repeated.
Dominic ran out the back and Jordan was heading upstairs when she glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye. Lily’s journal was sitting on the sideboard in the dining room, next to a filthy pair of gardening gloves.
She hesitated, then hurried over to it. Without allowing herself to ponder the pros and cons of what she was doing, she grabbed the book and shoved it into her plastic bag next to the Star Crunches.

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