Wish You Were Dead (10 page)

Ru22cool? said …
Done anything to improve your looks yet, complainer?

Str-S-d said …
Go to hell, Ru22.

IaMnEmEsIs said …
Dreams do come true.

Realgurl4013 said …
You go, giiirl! You’re a jeeerk, Ru22.

Ru22cool? said …
Oh, wow, Realgurl, that really hurt! Ow, ouch, ouch! I’m in suuuch pain! Loooser.

ApRilzDay said …
What is WRONG with all of you? You’re like a bunch of five-year-olds. And listen, Str-S-d, seriously? You know about KARMA, right? Obviously, writing and wishing someone would die isn’t as bad as doing it, but it still sends NEGATIVE ENERGY into the world. And it’s also not good for YOU personally. People are attracted to POSITIVE people, and you’re not exactly being positive when you’re wishing someone would die. The same goes for the rest of you. Got that, Ru22cool?

Ru22cool? said …
Drop dead.

Realgurl4013 said …
I know negative people can be a drag. But sometimes you can’t help it. If people are really mean, you know?

ApRilzDay said …
I don’t see how being mean back will make anything better.

Str-S-d said …
It makes me feel better.

chapter
11

Saturday 7:04
P.M
.

I SPENT HOURS on Saturday afternoon trying to pick an outfit for Safe Rides that night, wanting to look good for Tyler without being obvious about it. The same went for makeup. Just a little bit of eye shadow, mascara, a touch of blush and lip gloss. I wasn’t used to spending so much time on my appearance, and the longer I stared at my reflection in the mirror, the more nervous I felt.

By dinnertime I’d lost my appetite, even though the hearty scent of stew had spread through the downstairs rooms. In the kitchen, Mom and Dad were sitting at the table speaking in hushed voices. As soon as they saw me, they stopped. Mom gave me a nervous “I hope you didn’t hear what we were talking about” look. Then her expression changed, becoming more open and curious when she saw that I was wearing new jeans and an oatmeal-colored cashmere turtleneck. “Don’t you have Safe Rides tonight?”

I knew instantly what she was implying. “Is it that obvious?” I asked, dismayed by the possibility that I’d overdone the clothes and makeup.

“Maybe only to me,” she said, “because I know what you usually wear. So?”

“There’s this guy.…”

Mom and Dad exchanged surprised, and not displeased, looks.

“Do we know him?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “He’s new this year. And nothing’s going on, so can we please,
please
skip the parental interrogation?”

Mom gestured for me to have a seat and served me a bowl of stew from a big pot on the stove. She specialized in dinners that didn’t require a lot of oversight, so that she could multitask while the food cooked. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I tried a spoonful.

“This is delicious, Mom,” I said, then nodded at the big pot on the stove. “But why’s there so much?”

“Comfort food for the Cunninghams,” she said. “We’ll bring it over later. I only wish there was something more we could do for them.”

“How are they?” I asked.

“I spoke to Paul today,” Dad said. “The police haven’t come up with anything solid, and neither has the private detective he’s hired. He sounded very low.”

“What about the guys at the party from FCC?” I asked.

Dad shook his head slowly. “He didn’t mention anything about that.”

The conversation turned to preparing the
Time Off
for winter dry dock. Dad planned to spend a good part of the next day at the marina. I listened with one ear and tried not to watch the kitchen clock. I just wanted to get to the Safe Rides office and see Tyler.

The office would open at eight
P.M.
, but I made myself wait until 8:10 before I walked in. Dave Ignatzia was sitting at the desk. I stopped and looked around.

“Looking for Tyler?” he asked. “He called me this morning. Said something last-minute came up and he was going away for the long weekend and could I take his place?”

It was the second night of a three-day weekend. School would be closed on Monday for a conference. The flip side of safe was boring, and you couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to get away from Soundview for a few days. And yet I felt like I’d been blindsided. I’d been so focused on sharing dispatching duties with Tyler that night that it had never occurred to me that he might back out.

“Sorry,” Dave muttered, and I had no doubt he could read the disappointment in my face.

“Oh, Dave, you have nothing to be sorry about.” I forced a self-conscious laugh. “It just, you know, caught me by surprise.”

“I guess life’s full of surprises,” he said with what I suspected was half-veiled resentment.

Inside the Safe Rides office were two old desks with phones to take the calls from kids who needed rides. Spread around the rest of the room were half a dozen mismatched chairs, as well as a small TV, DVD player, and microwave oven. I took off my jacket and scarf and hung them on a hook by the door. Dave cleaned his glasses on the tail of his shirt. For an instant, he looked a little bit like Michael J. Fox, the star of that old movie
Back to the Future
. Then he slid his glasses back on and his eyes became the extra large size I was used to. “You look nice tonight,” he said.

“Why, thank you,” I said, caught off guard by the compliment.

“Too bad for Tyler, huh?”

I felt an inward grimace. Was it
that
obvious that I’d dressed up for Tyler? Would everyone who came into the office tonight
immediately guess the same thing? I sat down. “Let’s hope that’s the last surprise for tonight.”

“He’s kind of mysterious, isn’t he?” Dave asked.

“Tyler?” I said a bit uncomfortably. “I guess.”

“Here’s the thing I don’t get,” Dave said. “How come people want to know more about him, and not about me?”

“I guess because he’s new here,” I said. “People don’t know him.”

“And you think you know me? Maybe there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

“Isn’t that true of just about everyone?”

“Some people get more of a chance to show who they are. Other people never get the chance.”

We hit an awkward silence. I kept thinking about Tyler. There had to be a million reasons why he’d switched at the last minute with Dave, and surely “hot date” was one of them. But speculating about things I had no way of confirming was a bad idea, and I forced my thoughts back into the Safe Rides office and Dave. “Well, what’s one thing you’d like everyone to know about you?”

I don’t think Dave expected that question. “Uh … I guess I’d just want people to know that I’m a nice guy.”

“I think people know that,” I said.

“But …” Dave began to say something, then must have had second thoughts. Instead he reached into his backpack and pulled out a DVD. “Hey, want to watch
Juno
tonight?”

“Sure,” I said, even though this would probably be the dozenth time I’d see that movie about a quirky girl my age who has a baby and decides to give it away. Still, it might help get my mind off Tyler.

The door opened and Ms. Skelling came in, followed by Maura. Our faculty advisor was wearing a full-length shearling with the kind of stitching that had been fashionable in the 1970s or 1980s, and I wondered if it was something she’d kept from her heydays along the Philadelphia Main Line.

“Are we all set for tonight?” she asked while Maura removed her ski jacket.

“I’m taking Tyler’s place on the desk,” Dave announced. “The driving teams are Maura and Courtney and the lesbians from Mars.”

Ms. Skelling frowned. “Keep it to yourself, Dave. Anyone know what’s on tap?” She gazed at me as she asked.

“There’s supposed to be a kegger in the woods beside the baseball field across from Tony’s nursery,” I said.

The door swung open again and Sharon and Laurie came in. Sharon was wearing her permanent scowl, which only seemed to increase when she saw Dave on the desk.

“Hi, girls, we’re just discussing the plan for tonight,” Ms. Skelling told them. “So far we know there’ll be a kegger in the woods across from the nursery.”

“Jocks,” Sharon instantly concluded as she pulled her hoodie over her head. “Well, looks like we’ll be busy.”

Laurie slumped into a chair without taking off her brown peacoat. Her silent ambiguity always struck me as eerie and unsettling. You had to wonder what was behind that blank look.

“Is there anything else going on that we should know about?” Ms. Skelling asked. She had not taken off her coat and I had the feeling she was eager to get everything settled for the evening so that she could leave. Did she have a date waiting somewhere?

“I heard there’s a party at some sophomore’s house in the heights,” said Laurie.

“Oh, dear,” Ms. Skelling said with a touch of resignation in her voice. “We all know what that means. Make sure you have buckets in your cars.” She turned to Dave. “The log?”

“Right.” Dave pulled open the desk drawer and took out the ring binder where we recorded every call, and the details of each “run” the driving teams did throughout the evening.

Ms. Skelling checked her watch, then looked at me. “We’re sure Courtney’s coming?”

“She always has to be fashionably late,” Sharon sniped.

“She’ll be here,” I said, even though Courtney and I still weren’t speaking.

“All right,” Ms. Skelling said. “Have a safe evening. And let’s make absolutely sure every client is safely inside their destination before we leave them.”

She left, but the echo of her final words remained as a not-too-subtle reminder of my recent failure to follow the rules. The Safe Rides office grew uncomfortably quiet for a moment.

“I don’t get it.” Dave finally broke the silence. “A party
and
a kegger after what happened last weekend? I would have thought people wouldn’t be in the partying mood.”

“Aw, look at Mr. Sensitive,” Sharon said snidely.

“I think you’ve got it backward,” Dave shot back.
“You’d
have to be totally insensitive
not
to feel that way.”

“You think those unenlightened testosterone-addled Neanderthals care about anything except themselves?” Sharon said. “Boy, are
you
in the dark.”

Dave glanced at me and I tried to give him a look that said,
Don’t take it seriously. It’s just Sharon being Sharon
.

“I saw that,” Sharon snapped. “God, you’re all so smug. So righteous. You make me sick.”

Suddenly I hoped there’d be lots of parties that night. Anything to get Sharon out of the Safe Rides office and into her car.

This had been the worst week of Adam Pinter’s life. He’d finally gotten up the guts to end his relationship with Lucy. He knew she wouldn’t take it well, but who could have anticipated this? Lucy gone? Inexplicably vanished? Adam couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow responsible. The fight they’d had the night she’d disappeared had been the worst ever. He knew about her condition and the medications she took. But could he really imagine that Lucy would do herself in over him? No, it was inconceivable—condition or no condition. He had never met anyone as grimly determined to succeed. Whatever the prize was, Lucy always had her eyes on it and nothing else. No one knew that better than he. After all, that was what he was to her, just another prize.

But that didn’t make him feel any less guilty. If only he’d followed his instincts from the start. Even though Lucy was beautiful and had a killer body, she’d always come across as too serious and determined. Being that he himself was pretty serious and determined, he’d almost always been attracted to girls who just liked to have a good time and not sweat all the serious stuff. So when Lucy had first turned her serious determination on him, he’d known instinctively that the two of them would be a bad match.

And yet, in the beginning there’d been another side to Lucy, playful and sexy and alluring. She was a girl who knew how to get what she wanted, and he’d gradually given in to her subtle but steadfast attention. There was something seductive about feeling wanted, and Lucy had made sure he felt that way.

Until it started to change. It almost seemed that the more confident Lucy was that she had him, the less she thought she needed to try. For the past six months, Adam had felt trapped. The playful, sexy Lucy had morphed into someone he’d privately nicknamed “Mother Lucy,” someone who seemed to have their whole life together planned out, only it wasn’t necessarily the life he wanted. He understood that part of the problem stemmed from her condition. She couldn’t deal with uncertainty. Because dilemmas and ambiguity could easily tip her into depression, she always needed to feel certain and definite. And once he’d been made aware of her condition, he’d felt obligated to do everything he could to help her feel stable and secure.

But gradually, her condition began to overshadow everything they did. More and more he felt like it was his job to make sure she was happy and secure. And strangely, the more obligated he felt, the less happy he was. He was a teenager, for God’s sake, and yet sometimes he felt like he was facing a lifetime of taking care of an incredibly hardworking and demanding invalid.

Besides, someone else had entered the picture. Someone interesting and exotic. Someone fun and undemanding who always seemed thankful when he could sneak away to be with her. She was like an oasis, far from the stresses and pressures of his life—the polar opposite of Lucy.