Текст книги "Twisted Fate"

Автор книги: Norah Olson

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

I responded to the call in the late afternoon. Shocked to hear it on the scanner. And I fully expected it to be some contractor who’d had too much to drink at Kelley’s Dockside Happy Hour. But it wasn’t. There was already a small crowd there. It was a chilly day, but bright, and the sun was just beginning to get low in the sky—reflecting out across the water. You never would have known on a day so normal and beautiful that something could go so horribly wrong. People never expect it, but in my experience, that’s when it happens.

I patrolled the harbor regularly and I’d been used to breaking up some or other nonsense, carpenters who had maybe a few too many, kids who were bothering the yacht owners with their music or smoking or skateboarding. But mostly I would be cruising by and making sure things were as they should be. And in Rockland, hell, in Rockland things usually were. People kept to themselves for the most part. Yeah, maybe the rich folks stay up in their neighborhoods or at the yacht club or country club or the golf course. Maybe us regular folks go down to the seaside public parks to grill and play baseball. Make picnics and let the kids play at the shore. What I’m saying is the town didn’t mingle a lot. There was a big old divide between the west and east side, but folks didn’t mean each other any harm. Not here.

I don’t know how to say this without just saying it. When strangers move to town, things get shaken up. People from away don’t quite fit in—not down at the park and not up at the golf course either. And you gotta wonder why they left where they were from in the first place. I knew it when I was in the ambulance staring down at that kid. This isn’t the kind of problem we have here, I thought to myself. This just isn’t the kind of thing we do. And I shoulda known. I shoulda known all along. I shoulda never dropped my guard, been charmed, been taken in. The fact was I saw it coming, I’d been warned. I might be just a small-town cop but I’ve been around the block and I knew the kinds of things that go on in this world.

I’d dragged bodies out of the water before—this is Maine and it gets cold and the water gets treacherous sometimes. There were tragedies for sure; drowning, boating while intoxicated, a suicide. But this. Nothing like it. I never had to show up at a parent’s doorstep and tell them the thing that would destroy their life.

Never. Not until that day.

I don’t know why I wanted Declan to spy on him. I guess I wanted to see what he was really like. At the time I didn’t have any information about him, just what I could observe by hanging around. And I have to admit I had a strong reaction whenever I thought of him or when anyone mentioned him. It wasn’t even so much that he was handsome—though he certainly was.

Honestly, I just think I was bored. Bored bored bored. Some days I actually feel like I’m trapped in the school. Like the place is really a jail. We’re forced by law to go there—to be there all day. It’s the closest thing to a prison there is. In fact it’s like the whole population actually has to go to prison first before they can enter society. Have to make sure we learn these arbitrary bullshit rules—make sure we won’t talk back, that we’ll follow orders. Once we prove that, once they’ve ruined our ability to even think for ourselves—then they let us go.

Declan was right about having to pretend we’re not in some tedious made-for-TV movie. It’s not like you really have to study. If you pay attention for even one minute you know what’s going on. I used to beg my parents to let me stay home and read something good instead of wasting my time at school, but then Ally liked school so much I’d just get dragged along with her—sucked into her idea about it. That didn’t last forever obviously but when I was young she’d always coax me to get up in the morning and tell me how much fun class was going to be.

After a while it was anything but fun. I’d be stuck sitting at my desk for hours and hours after I already got it, listening to some teacher who just has a BA from a shitty school and a teaching certificate from the state of Maine drone on and on and on and on instead of being outside skating or reading a good book or listening to music. School might be fine for Ally and her friends but not for me. Not for Declan and Becky either. And I had a feeling—not for Graham. Something about the way he looked at things made me feel like he was already done with whatever it was school was theoretically supposed to offer. Really done. Like he’d already been to college and had a job and two kids and been divorced and remarried and had become an alcoholic and was paying double alimony and child support even though he was just a kid. That’s how heavy his look was. He was weary and skittish and somehow weirdly confident; up to something, beaten down but unbeaten. And he was clearly on some kind of drugs. I mean clearly the kid was wasted half the time—or at least that’s the impression I got. Sometimes his pupils were dilated and sometimes they were little pinpricks.

“Don’t you think you’re giving this guy a little too much thought?” Declan very reasonably asked. “I mean, he sounds chill. I’m not really up for spying on some guy because you’ve got a crush. It doesn’t bother me; it shouldn’t bother you. Why don’t we just hang with him?”

This was classic Declan. Once he got high he was all philosophical about how “everything in the world is connected” and everyone is chill and we should all get along. And peace and love and God in the smallest drop of water blah blah blah.

“Yeah, a lot of thought,” Becky said, and then started laughing. “Too much thought.” She looked at us but couldn’t keep a straight face. “Is he yummy?” Then she laughed again. “Oh . . . wait . . . no . . . didn’t mean to say yummy . . . ,” she whispered to herself. “Is he . . . um . . . ?”

“He’s like some kind of teen idol,” I said, interrupting her weird digression. “It’s gross actually. Fancy car, fancy clothes, pretty golden hair, like he belongs in a catalog, except for all the other stuff I told you about. Y’know, how he looks like an old man kinda . . . all serious.” I could have gone on and on discussing the details but I got lost thinking about it and then I got distracted looking at the leaves moving gently in the wind.

“Definitely not your type,” Declan said, grinning, bringing me back to the conversation. “But he doesn’t sound like a creepy dweeb either.”

Becky laughed. She said, “Dweepy creeb.”

“He is!” I shouted. “Being from a catalog and being a creep are not mutually exclusive. They don’t cancel each other out, you can be one and still the other. You can—”

“We get it, we get it,” Declan said, waving his hands in front of my face. “It just seems weird of you to be so wrapped up in a guy like that when you only hung out with him once. I know you have your Spidey senses, Tate, but maybe they’re not working with this dude. I mean, think about who you really want to invest your energy in.” He leaned forward, smiled beatifically at me, and batted his eyelashes.

It was funny but I really didn’t want Declan to start going on and on about “energy,” which was a whole other lecture he liked to give when he was high. “Energy” and then, without fail, physics and string theory and YouTube videos of talking crows. Weed just made Declan more in awe of the world than he already was, which was saying something, and made him talk ten times as much, which could get pretty unbearable—especially if you were also a little effed-up.

I knew what he was getting at by the “my type” comment. Declan was “my type” and he knew it. He was the ranked chess champ of the county, had nearly a perfect score on his PSAT, and he dealt pot and read Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen. That’s who I want to be with. That’s who I want to run away and sleep on the beach with. That’s who I want to give it to and take it from. Not some weird kid from the south. I told myself that again to make sure I really got it. Declan, I thought. Declan, not Graham.

But I had to admit there was some pull I felt from Graham. Like he knew something about me right away. Something other people ignored or just didn’t realize. There was a mystery about him that I wanted to understand. The way he laughed when he met me and Ally. The way he looked at Ally. Our fates were twisted. I knew it the minute he crossed into our yard and stood with the sun on his face beneath the pine tree.

I know it seems like even then I was becoming obsessed with him. That I was paying too much attention to him, like Declan said. Now I only wish I had paid more attention. Those cool blue eyes were used to looking at people a certain way. Used to being looked at like he was the black sheep. And he was smart. My only hope, now that time is running out, is that he was never—even at his best—smarter than me.

I told Sydney about the calls at work and she made her usual snide comments. She told me that it definitely wasn’t some cell tower problem and that probably someone was stalking me and that I should have told Mrs. Porter. It’s a little hard to take her ideas seriously sometimes. She can get paranoid and see the worst in everything. I told her I’d tell Ginny Porter if it happened again but that I wasn’t going to jump to any conclusions about anything or take advice from someone dressed head to toe in black. “Can you get out the sugar?” I asked her. I was reading a new scone recipe.

“You’re ignoring me!” she shouted.

“I think I’ll put walnuts in these,” I told her, and she groaned and slapped her forehead dramatically.

“Listen to me, Ally,” she said. “Has anything like that ever happened at work before?”

“Not that I remember,” I said, cutting the butter into small squares and pouring a cup of sugar into the bowl.

Syd was overreacting as usual and I think this time it was because she was jealous. The fact is Syd can be jealous of my job. It’s probably the only thing she is jealous of. I don’t think there’s anything else she pays attention to. She’s jealous of my job because she’s unemployable. She interviewed for positions at other B and Bs in town and did not get them. Too busy hanging out skating with Becky and Declan to really make an effort to get dressed up and submit a résumé and look like she was interested in the places. And I think people could tell by looking at her that she was a little wild.

She said, “Whatever, Ally. Suit yourself. I’m going over to Declan’s!” That was her solution to everything. She barely spent any time at home anymore. And if you said something that made her upset or contradicted her, she went over to Declan’s.

I like Becky and Declan fine. Even though they act like I don’t exist. I remember the first time Declan came over and Syd brought him to our room. He looked at her posters and he looked at mine—looked at the stuff on my side of the room—and he laughed really hard. Right in front of me. He said, “You’re a master of irony.” I walked out of the room. I’m sure they needed their privacy anyway.

Becky, I actually like a lot. I mean she and Syd have been friends since they were little kids. And we used to play together sometimes. My friends, of course, don’t want to spend time around Syd at all. So I stopped introducing her to them. I generally see them at school or at work. The few times I tried to hang out with her and one of my friends she was really rude. We were baking a quiche together and she wouldn’t help with anything or clean up. She just sat on the counter, swinging her feet, acting bored, and kinda making fun of us. She kept saying, “So who’s your boyfriend?” It was really awkward. Or, “Have you ever even made out with a boy?” Not very classy.

I think the only friend we really had in common was Graham. In fact he may be the only person we really spent time with as sisters—Graham brought us together. At last. But not for very long, obviously. Things went really fast once Graham moved next door. Life changed in the blink of an eye.

Since Graham moved in it seemed that all he did was mess around with his car. He would keep the garage door open and I had a pretty good view of him from the screened-in porch on the west side of our house. So I would sit out there sometimes and watch him. I didn’t feel bad doing this. I knew he watched us too and I knew he was really interested in Allyson.

A lot of the time he would go into the garage with a cup of coffee in his hand, wearing his jeans and a ratty V-neck T-shirt. Sometimes he would stand there looking at the car not doing anything for about half an hour. Other times he’d be bent over the engine.

Something about the way he moved really got to me. I couldn’t decide if I liked it or thought he was a creep. His body was more relaxed than Declan’s. He seemed lithe like a puppy, but sleepy. He moved slowly. And I could see the muscles in his back when he was leaning over the hood of the car.

Also he was a superrich kid doing manual labor, which seemed like a contradiction somehow. Most of the preppy boys I knew sailed or snowboarded or did other things like that for hobbies. No one rebuilt cars, or fixed things. I liked that he was different, but there was something that seemed dangerous about him. Even by himself—not talking to anyone and tinkering around all alone, he seemed moody. I watched him throw a wrench across the garage because he was frustrated. And another time I watched him sit in the car staring straight ahead—lost in thought, it looked like he was wiping tears out of his eyes.

There was something wrong with Graham. And I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know what made him the way he was, to be his friend, to talk to him and hang out, to go driving with him. I wanted to know his secrets.

I wanted to make him disappear.

1:42—Yacht club

5:37—Best Buy

7:00—Woods

18:54—Roof

Dear Lined Piece of Paper,

I have to figure out a way to talk to her. If I had more confidence—just normal confidence—I’d have asked for her digits. I’d have gotten her email at least. I’d have said, “Are you on Facebook?” I would have done whatever regular people do when they meet someone.

What is that anyway? I guess the kind of stuff I used to do with Eric. I’d have taken her for a ride in the Austin, I’d have shown her the screening room in my house or Kim’s paintings. And maybe some of the things I didn’t do with Eric. But of course I didn’t think of any of these things at the time. I thought about kissing her. Right there in the driveway. I thought how nice it would be to just reach out and hold her hand. She was standing so close I don’t know how I could have thought of anything else. And I think she must have felt the same way. I’m hoping she did. The way she joked. The way she looked right at me when she talked.

Thanks to Dr. Adams, though, I can fix this shyness. I thought I was taking enough to make me feel a little better in these social situations, but apparently I am not. I mean, I’m fine talking to strangers now and that kind of thing, but being around her made me feel so nervous. The way I used to feel going to school or talking to other kids. So you know what? I’m just going to take more. What can they do about it? Nothing. And besides, I know that taking more makes me feel better. I can’t spend my time stammering at the end of a telephone or hanging up or just looking at her out of my window.

I’ll never get her to be in my movies if I can’t talk to her. Or take her for a ride or go to the beach or anything. I want so badly to just drive. To just drive around with her.

The thing is we all have a choice now about who we want to be. We don’t have to be how we were born. If there’s a problem, if you don’t do something right, you can fix it. That’s why these drugs exist in the first place. Imagine what the world was like without them.

Becky grabbed me after biology class just as I was headed outside to the unofficial smoking lounge—the benches under the big maple just two feet off school property. She had a distant, goofy grin on her face and she was carrying a pile of books.

“Okay. He is actually super freaking HOT!” she said. “Your description did not do him justice—he’s like actually interesting looking, not just some pretty boy. I don’t think there’s anything bad about him at all.”

“Hello? And you are talking about who? A little context here, please . . .”

“Okay. So, this morning I am walking to school and Graham drives by in like this James Bond car or something—but you know, like a James Bond car from the seventies—like Sean Connery James Bond . . . or the one right after him. Who was the one after him?”

I rolled my eyes. “Not that much context.”

Becky laughed. “And so I just watch him cruise by,” she said. “I think, okay, he’s cute. But THEN when I got to school I went around back and was sneaking a smoke out by that one corner where they don’t have their freaking spy cameras set up and he’s STILL sitting in his car.

“C’mon.” She pulled me by the arm and started walking back behind the school.

I dragged my feet following her and felt again like this kid had some kind of weird power. My sister, now my best friend—who was next, Declan? Was I the only one who thought there was something weird going on? Was Declan going to be best buds with this kid? But I only had to worry about that one for a second.

“I don’t know why you and Declan don’t like him,” Becky went on, stopping to light her cigarette. “Declan called him a drug addict, which I thought was hilarious. He said his eyes look funny and he seemed too skinny. I was like, YOU? You are calling someone a drug addict? You are saying someone is skinny and has red eyes or whatever? YOU, Declan Wells? Okay, whatever.”

We rounded the corner of the school and sure enough his car was still parked there. “Oh, sh sh sh,” Becky said, as if I had been the one loudly talking about him being a drug addict.

I had rarely seen Becky like this. She could be flighty, but generally she was too cool to get all hung up on some dude. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Look at his car. Is he like the richest person in the world or what? It looks like his clothes are manufactured by magic fairies to fit his body perfectly.”

“Jesus, Beck, can you stay focused for like two minutes?”

Graham saw us walking toward the car and waved. We waved back.

“Howdy, neighbor,” I said sarcastically when we reached the car. He was sitting there, clearly staring at Becky. Instead of saying hello he just said:

“Can I film you, Becky? I just want some footage of you smoking.”

Becky paused like some starstruck twelve-year-old. She exhaled a cloud of smoke into the crisp fall air and laughed shyly.

“Why do you want to film her?” I asked.

“I’m making this movie. It’s not a documentary or anything. It’s an art film, but it’s got real people talking about themselves in it.”

“Yeah, sure,” Becky said.

And then he took out the tiniest camera I’ve ever seen and filmed her face really close up, then asked her to say her name and exhale the smoke. He didn’t even get out of his car.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Perfect.” He was completely relaxed and confident in a way I’d never seen him. And Declan was right—his eyes were messed up—not like ours got, bloodshot, but weirder. The pupils were hugely dilated. Sometimes when I saw him they were constricted like little pinpoints but now they were wide, a black void surrounded by a pretty pale-blue ring of iris. But there was no denying he was handsome.

He filmed her for a few more moments. “What’s your address?” he asked, and she replied, smiling at him, pushing her hair behind her ears. “Where do you go to school? Do you like it here?” She answered all his questions and then he took a little notebook from the glove compartment and wrote something down.

“So what are you going to do with all this?” Becky asked when he was done.

“I’m going to use it as part of a feature-length movie,” he said. “An experimental movie. And hopefully bring it to London with me when I go again with my stepmom. She has some artwork at an auction house there and there’s a film festival I want to enter some of my stuff in.”

It was interesting, but I don’t know if I believed him entirely. I thought he might be lying to impress us, or to get Becky to go out with him.

“Well, thanks, ladies,” he said, then put his car in gear. “Bye, Becky.” He waved. “See you at home, Tate.” Then he drove away. He clearly wasn’t planning on going to school that day.

“Uh . . . don’t you think that was a little weird?” I asked Becky.

“No, I think it’s freaking awesome! He seems like a real artist. Oh, and I found out he’s taking studio art, so I’ll see him in there while the rest of you brainiacs are sitting stoned off your ass in Beecher’s bullshit chemistry lab. Ha!”

“If he ever shows up,” I said.

“Oh, he’ll show up, he’s FINE. What the hell is it with you? He does all the things you normally like. If I didn’t know better I’d say you had a crush on him and you just don’t know how to deal. You’re acting like a third-grade boy. C’mon, Tate! This is the coolest kid who’s moved to town in the history of Rockland and he lives right next DOOR to you. You should be psyched!”

“Maybe,” I said. “There’s more to people than their cool cars and their pretty clothes.”

“Right,” said Becky. “There’s their cool artwork and cool ideas and awesome bodies. And if he’s on drugs, he’s on something better than what we’ve got. We should check that out, no?”

I sighed and shrugged. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I did have a crush on him. So little went on in Rockland it was easy to fixate on anything new that came along. And she was right in a way, Graham was cool. It would be something to know how to build a car or make movies. The things we did most were skateboard, talk about how we hated school while actually taking all the best classes and competing for class rank, listening to music and getting high, and wandering around the sleepy harbor town at night.

Graham had had some other, deeper life. It showed on his skin. I didn’t know what it was that drew me to him and made me resist the very idea of hanging out with him at the same time.

Becky tossed her cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with her toe and then she put her arm around me and we started walking back in to our next classes.

She said, “C’mon, lovebug. I think things are really looking up!”