Hallie Hath No Fury . . . (2 page)

“Don't,” I said immediately, even though I really could have used someone else to help me with this. “You need to keep your scholarship, remember?” Josh had gotten a scholarship to go to this summer-long lacrosse camp, and had unofficially been promised one to attend Clarence Hall, a super-prestigious boarding school, starting in the fall.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “But…”

“It actually might be easier if you're not here,” I said, thinking about the fact that all Josh's meals and expenses were taken care of at his camp. The bills had started piling up, some of them with really scary words like
LAST NOTICE
printed across them in huge letters.

“Okay,” Josh said after a pause. “But you promise to tell me if you change your mind? I could be there in a couple of hours.”

“Promise,” I agreed, secretly crossing the fingers on my left hand. I didn't know how bad things would have to get for me to actually follow through with calling him—and I hoped I wouldn't have to find out. We hung up then, and I walked down the hall to my mother's room, hoping with every step I took that she'd be back to her normal self—to the person she'd been before this summer, the one I'd always known before the Tuckers entered the picture. She'd be up and dressed and writing on her laptop, or reading a book, totally absorbed, or watching the kind of cheesy romance movie she pretended to watch ironically, to “deconstruct the tropes,” whatever that meant. That she'd be back to being my mom again.

But as I stood in the doorway and glanced in through the crack of the open door, I felt my heart sink. My mother was dressed and the bed was made, but she was curled into a ball on top of the covers, like even these small acts had exhausted her. I took a step back and pulled the door slowly shut. I tried to tell myself that it was fine, that she'd snap out of it. But I realized, as I walked down the hall to my own room, that while I could lie to Josh, I wasn't really able to do the same to myself, with any chance of believing it. And for the first time, I started to get really, really scared of what was going to happen next.

*   *   *

“Hallie?” I jolted upright from where I'd been leaning back against my pillows and reading. Since nothing had changed in the two days since I'd talked to Josh, I'd mostly been trying to avoid thinking about the rapidly deteriorating situation and lose myself in books. I was re-reading old favorites, books that were as comforting to me as a cozy sweater. Every time I'd finish one, I'd be snapped back to reality—my mother, her situation, the fact that she apparently no longer had a job or any desire to get one—but then I'd pick up another book to try to keep the world at bay for a while. But now, I slid off the bed and turned to face my mother, realizing as I did so that I hadn't seen her upright in a while. She didn't look great—her skin was pale and there were dark circles under her eyes—but she was standing and talking to me, so I decided to count this as a win.

“Hi,” I said with a tentative smile. “How are you … I mean…”

She gave me a smile that didn't reach her eyes. “I'm okay,” she said in a voice that was still crackly, like she hadn't been using it in a while. “I've just been … not feeling great.”

I nodded, willing her to tell me that she was feeling fine now, that she'd be back to normal and fix everything somehow. But she just nodded down to the cardboard box she had tucked underneath her arm.

“I was hoping you could go through this,” she said. “It's stuff from this summer that Paul…” Her voice caught on his name, and I nodded and walked over to take it from her.

“Sure,” I said, realizing as I looked down into it that it was the box of things Paul had brought by that last day, when Gemma had stayed in the car, refusing to look me in the eye. “I'll take care of it.”

“Thanks,” my mother said. “I started to do it myself, but it just got too hard.” I nodded and silently cursed Paul with a venom I didn't know I possessed until that moment. I was sure that he was doing fine in his Hamptons mansion. He'd broken my mother's heart and wrecked her career—for reasons I still didn't understand—and then left me to pick up the pieces. She looked around my room, at the stack of books on my bed. “What are you reading?” she asked, sounding something like her old self for the first time in a long time.

“Oh, just old favorites,” I said, knowing my mother would understand this completely. She re-read her old copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
at least once a year and was always trying to get me into it, even though I had no interest. Whenever I'd tried, I'd gotten bored by the elaborate, years-in-the-making revenge plot, flipping pages to see when the romance would get started.

“Anything I can borrow?” she asked, taking a step closer. “I need something to distract me right now.”

“Um…” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up as she picked up
Gloaming
, the first book in the vampire/cyborg love triangle trilogy that she'd told me repeatedly was doing nothing but rotting my brain. “You might not like it…”

“I might as well try it,” she said as she tucked the book under her arm, giving me a smile. “See what all the fuss is about, right?”

“It's just…” I started. I didn't want my mom reading the Gloaming books. What if she wanted to talk about whether I liked the vampire or the cyborg better, and which I thought was a better match for the perpetually indecisive, klutzy heroine? But my mom was already heading out the door, carrying my much dog-eared book with her. I let it go and turned to the box sitting on my carpet. I opened the lid and glanced inside—there was a shirt of mine that I recognized, a pair of flip-flops of my mother's, my green journal.… I started to take out my shirt, to add it to the laundry, when I realized that since my mother didn't want to go through this box at all, she probably wouldn't be checking up on me to make sure that I'd done it. Which bought me several weeks, at least. I pushed it under my bed with a quick kick and got back on my bed, picking up my book and settling back against the covers.

I stare at Gemma, sitting behind the window of the car. She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, a thunderclap sounds, so loud that it seems to shake the very ground I'm standing on. Then a crack appears at my feet, snaking across the sand, widening and widening until there is a gulf between me and Gemma, who is still in the car, that I know I'll never be able to cross. And before I can call out or say anything, the gap widens farther and the ground under me disappears, sending both me and Gemma tumbling into the darkness.

I woke with a jolt, my heart pounding hard in my chest. I brushed my hair away from my forehead and realized that it was damp with sweat. It was a nightmare, I told myself firmly. Just a nightmare, that's all.

I tried to lie down again and go back to sleep, but dream fragments were still spinning in my head, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw the gap between me and Gemma getting wider and wider, pulling us apart, so that it seemed impossible that we were ever standing next to each other.

I swung my legs down and got out of bed, heading for the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of water, drank it standing up next to the refrigerator, then filled it again and headed back to my room. I passed my mother's door as I went, and was surprised to see that there was a strip of light shining out from under her door, especially since the microwave clock had told me that it was four a.m.

I took a step closer to her door and looked inside. I half expected she'd still be reading—she'd finished
Gloaming
in a few hours and had appeared at my bedroom door, looking sheepish, wanting to know if I had the sequel. And when I'd been getting ready for bed, she'd emerged again, not looking embarrassed this time, just obsessed, demanding the final book in the trilogy. So I was prepared to see her reading the final book, the tragic ending to the epic love story. But as I nudged the door open, what I saw made my eyes widen in surprise. She was sitting behind her laptop, her fingers moving quickly over the keys, a look of determination on her face.

She was writing.

And as I backed away and shut the door quietly behind me, I felt, for the first time in a while, a small flare of hope.

CHAPTER 3

I looked up from my bowl of cereal and stared at my mother—what I could see of her, at least, from behind her laptop screen. “But
why?
” I asked, more surprised than anything else. “I don't need a babysitter.”

My mother was typing, rapid-fire, which was what she'd been doing for the last two weeks, starting the night I'd seen her writing at four a.m. Ever since then, she'd been writing constantly, barely even stopping to eat. She had a frantic look in her eye, one that I'd never seen when she had been writing before. Then, she'd written slowly, considering each word, and usually going back and deleting as she went. Now, it was like she couldn't get the words out fast enough, her hands pounding the keyboard. She paused now and lowered her screen to look at me.

She also wouldn't tell me what she was writing, saying vaguely only that she was starting something new, and didn't want to jinx anything by talking about specifics. “I know you don't,” she said, and even though she was looking at me, it was like I could practically
feel
how much she wanted to get back to her book. “But I need to get someone in here. They won't be a babysitter, exactly, just someone to clean and make sure you're eating more than pizza. I'm sorry I've been so out of it recently.”

I nodded. While I was happy that there was going to be someone helping out, I really wasn't sure we could afford it—especially since my mother seemed to have given up the job hunt entirely while she wrote this mysterious book. “But…” I started.

“Her name's Masha,” my mother said as she turned to her screen again and started typing, fingers already flying over the keyboard, clearly finished with the conversation. “She's starting today.”

I wasn't sure what I'd expected from a temporary housekeeper/ babysitter, but Masha was definitely not it. We'd never really had one, though there had been a husband-and-wife team who had come in to clean our Hamptons rental, both of whom seemed to blame me for the amount of sand tracked in from the beach. But Masha was tall, rail-thin, with black hair and bright red lipstick that she wore in a slash across her mouth. She seemed to wear only jeans and button-downs, and I had no idea if her hair was long or short, since it was always pulled back into a severe bun, without a single strand out of place.

While her English was good, she spoke with a thick accent. I'd assumed she was Russian, until I mentioned this to my mother (in the few seconds I got to speak with her, when she wasn't writing like her life depended on it). She'd said she thought Masha was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, but wasn't sure where. And then she'd gone back to typing so fast that her hands were like a blur.

Masha hadn't said much to me for the first few days, just nodded whenever she'd passed by, heading down to the basement of the building to do laundry. She had sighed over the state of my room and said, “You pick it up, so that I can clean. Okey-dokey?” I hadn't entirely understood this, but I'd nodded, and then forgotten about it entirely until I'd come back from the library one day to see Masha in my room, muttering under her breath as she vacuumed my carpet.

“Um, hi,” I said from the doorway as she straightened up from the vacuum and looked at me.

“Hello,” she said, her accent as thick as ever. “Here. You sort please, okay? Or else I throw away.” She pulled the box my mother had given me out from under the bed and pushed it across the carpet toward me.

“Throw away?” I echoed, taken aback. I wasn't sure there was anything in the box worth saving—if there was, wouldn't I have missed it already?—but I also wasn't sure I wanted someone tossing out my stuff willy-nilly. “You can't throw away my stuff.”

“Oh, no?” she asked as she unplugged the vacuum and started to wheel it toward the hall. “Maybe you don't know yet, but the world is tough place. And it only gets tougher. Best to learn it now, and not the hard way.” She raised an eyebrow at me and then left, taking the vacuum out into the hallway with her.

I rolled my eyes and looked down at the box. There was a piece of me that just wanted to put it back under the bed, call her bluff, see if she'd actually try to toss anything out. But then I dropped my library books on the bed and decided to just deal with it. The last thing I needed was my mother finding out that I hadn't, in fact, gone through this box when she asked me to.

I sat down on the ground and started sorting through it. There was the button-down of my mother's she'd worn as a bathing-suit cover-up all summer, and a T-shirt of mine that I now remembered leaving by the pool one day when it had started to rain unexpectedly and Gemma and I had dashed inside. There was a paperback my mother had been reading, a souvenir key chain I'd picked up at one of the local shops, and my journal. I sorted the clothes into piles, set the book aside for my mother, and tossed my journal on my desk. I was breaking down the box so it could go in with the recycling, when I froze. I looked over at my nightstand, where my journal—the green one that Paul had bought me at Southampton Stationery—was lying open. I'd been writing in it last night before I went to bed.

I dropped the box at my feet and hurried back over to my desk. I picked up the journal, and sure enough, it was Gemma's handwriting across the front, not mine. Paul had bought them for both of us, so he must have just assumed this one was mine.

Even though I knew I should stop before I started, I flipped to the first page and felt myself smile as I read it.

Having so much fun with Hallie. Maybe we can still hang out when the summer's over and school starts again? Will have to ask Dad. After all, she's only a train ride away.…