Killing Ruby Rose (7 page)

He laughed, and I couldn’t help but notice his perfectly straight white teeth against his sun-kissed face.

“I know we’ve goofed around in class, and said ‘hey’ in the halls and stuff, but you’re sort of intimidating,” he said. I could have sworn the sun came out just to do that shiny, sparkly thing off his teeth.

“I don’t think
intimidating
is the right word,” I said. “Maybe
unrelatable
…
my therapist says I’m unrelatable.” Why was I telling him I had a therapist?

“Oh
…
kay, unrelatable, unreachable, unattainable, sure.” He looked over at me with raised eyebrows and a suppressed laugh. Seriously, dudes shouldn’t have such long eyelashes. “You hit your head pretty hard yesterday. I hope you’re OK.”

“Did I?” I asked. I honestly didn’t remember. Physical pain hardly ever bothered me. I’d gotten good at ignoring bumps and bruises.

“Right here,” he said, reaching up to stroke my hair where my head had hit the floor. Now that he was touching it, that spot felt tender. But in this moment, I thanked the injury for giving me a rare moment of physical contact. Mom hadn’t hugged me in years, and Dad’s physical expressions of love (since I’d become a teen) consisted of sparring matches and pats on the head. In general, I’d always been pretty successful at keeping people within carefully controlled parameters. Even Alana had to hammer past my aversion to touch—what Dr. T said was part of my
autophobia
, or fear of abandonment. Which of course got ten times worse when my father was murdered.

But this uninvited touch from Liam? I didn’t hate it.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said, eyes down, blood pressure up.

“That’s good.” It took him a few strung-out beats before he lowered his hand. “Listen, I wanted to tell you something.”

“OK, shoot,” I said awkwardly. Not my best choice of words.

“Well, I don’t want to come across as a creepy stalker kind of guy.” He played with the damp sand in his hands. “But yesterday at the art fair
…
I noticed this guy. Well, a man. He was watching you.”

“What?” I sat up taller. “What kind of man? A teacher?”

“No, I don’t think he was a teacher. I would’ve seen him around school before. He was definitely out of place. He was watching you in an intense sort of way, and it was weird. I didn’t like it.”

Had he seen Martinez, too? Maybe I wasn’t going crazy.

“What did he look like?” I asked, heart racing in a new way now.

“He was wearing a dark suit. No tie or anything, but a sort of athletic build, good-looking—like an older George Clooney kind of look.” He grabbed a piece of kelp and crushed a bulb between his fingers.

“Was he Latino?” I asked.

“No, he was definitely a white dude. Sort of light, graying hair and stubble. Anyway, do you know someone like that?”

“No, I don’t.” If he wasn’t talking about Martinez, then I had no idea who he was talking about (and I was officially crazy). None of my Filthy Five fit that description, unless one of them had hired a stylist and hit the gym like crazy for a few weeks. My fingers ached to open the notebook in my lap and write it all down.

“Then you passed out and he disappeared,” Liam said. “Do you think this guy has anything to do with the text you got that night?”

His question caught me off guard. No one, not even Alana, had dared ask me about that night. Even though most of the details had been leaked to the media—including the fact that I thought the text was from Liam—I’d successfully given off the don’t-talk-to-me-about-it vibe. Even without strict orders from Jane Rose, Esquire, I knew it wasn’t wise to discuss the investigation with anyone.

“You know, the night you…” Liam paused, and I prayed he wouldn’t say
shot that dude.
“
…
saved that girl? You think it might be him?”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I have no idea.”

“I
was
going to ask you to Homecoming—just so you know.” He crushed another bulb. “I bought the flowers and everything. And I was on my way over to your house when Alana called me to tell me about—”

“Uh-huh.” I didn’t need to hear the end of that sentence. I knew what had happened next. I went into seclusion, and he’d gone to Homecoming with Taylor instead.

“I would’ve done the same thing.” He turned to face me. “I would have pulled the trigger on that Charlie LeDouche, too. You did the right thing. No matter what anyone says, especially that Bill Brandon dude. I think you were brave.”

I squirmed a little. He was sneaking past too many of my carefully constructed boundaries with his charm and sincerity. This is what I admired about Liam from afar—his ability to make people feel better about themselves.

“Obviously, I don’t know
exactly
what happened,” he continued. “Only what I’ve seen on the news or read in the papers, but it seems to me you were put between a rock and a hard place, and you ended up saving a little girl. That’s totally amazing.”

I felt for the picture of the girl hidden in The Cleave. Next to my other important stuff—cell phone, lip gloss—she was there.

Then I did something totally unexpected. I pulled her out to show Liam.

“She sent me this,” I said, holding up the small picture.

His first reaction was shock—possibly at me reaching into my bra. Then his look changed as he wiped his hands on his wet suit and took the picture.

“Wow, this is her?” he asked.

“She sent me a letter, too, thanking me, telling me I’m her hero.” I looked out at the ocean and the frothy waves crashing in. “But I haven’t contacted her. The thing is, I don’t feel like a hero. I mean, I don’t regret killing him, because he deserved to die. He’ll never hurt anyone again,” I said, trying to stop the swell of truth gushing out of me, but unable to because it felt so good. “But it never should have happened. I never should have been put in that position. He should already have been behind bars. That little girl never should have needed saving—”

“She looks like you,” he said.

My attention jerked back to him. He saw the similarities, too. Liam Slater was smart, observant, and protective. And he seemed to really want to help me.

“I know!” I said. “No one else noticed that.”

“Well, they didn’t release her name or picture,” he countered.

“I mean the police. My mom. My therapist. People who saw her. None of them noticed.”

“I don’t know how they could have missed it.” He stared sadly at the picture, running his finger over the bandage on the girl’s neck where LeMarq had tried to kill her.

After a moment Liam reached up to his left ear and pulled his shaggy hair back over it. Through the wet strands I saw what he was trying to hide—a serious scar, pink and fleshy on the top part of his ear. I was surprised that, after all this time shamelessly staring at him, I’d never noticed it before. It must be why he always wore his hair long. I found myself desperately curious to know who’d done that to him and why.

The closer I looked now, the more I saw. His ear didn’t bear his only scar. There were scores of little circles up and down the sides of his body. Like he had the chicken pox or—someone had used him as an ashtray. I teetered on the edge of asking, but I didn’t dare. He was allowed to have his secrets, too.

He caught me examining him, and instead of being angry or ashamed, a look of little-boy sadness fell over him. He stared out at the sea with those eyes that changed a different shade of blue for every occasion. They were now a stormy slate, just like the clouded horizon.

Suddenly, I felt more truth bubbling inside me, and the urge to word-vomit everything. To share why I passed out in the cafeteria, the tattoo in the art, the
Love, D. S.
signature, the fact that I was stalking LeMarq, the photo of a frightened girl someone texted me last night, and the text blaming me for her death this morning. Another girl who looked like me. Liam already had more clues than the police did. He’d seen the guy who might be Mr. D. S. He could help me.

Or—he could hate me, despise me, and see me for who I really was. He could go to the cops, or worse, the media. Regardless of the way he was looking at me now, things would change. The truth would disgust him, repulse him.

The tide turned inside me, and my shell closed just like the oysters out in the ocean. I couldn’t let these little pearls of truth escape. Ever.

“I gotta go,” I said, grabbing the picture from his hand. As I shifted to get up, I felt his hand on my arm.

“What’s wrong? What’d I say?” he asked. His touch and the worry in his voice almost cracked the shell back open.

“Nothing.” I pulled away. “School starts in twenty minutes. I don’t want to make you late.” I speed walked through the clumpy sand, away from the emotional riptide that almost pulled me under.

“Ruby!” he called after me. “I’m sorry…” But the wind whipped away the last part of his apology.

As I climbed into Big Black, I resolved not to let Liam Slater get that close to me again. He could never hurt me if I never let him.

CHAPTER 7

I walked through the halls of Huntington Beach High wondering what it would be like to be that girl over there by the lockers—clearly in love with the boy next to her, and completely oblivious to every other concern in the world. Or that cheer chick in the courtyard, the one at the center of a gaggle of equally happy-go-lucky girls, laughing and listening to her glittery pink iPod. Or even that Goth boy by the water fountain, totally high as a kite. At least he
looked
happy.

I wondered what I looked like.

The bell rang, and I hurried to my Calc class at the end of the hall with my head down. Relieved not to be stopped, I slid into my seat at the back of the room and busied myself with my OCD preparations. Organizing my desk with the proper arrangement of my sharp mechanical pencil at my right, sleek calculator at my left, textbook center-right, notebook center-left, and bottle of water upper-right. A crack of the knuckles, and I was in the zone. A place where the only problems I had were mathematical.

When Mr. Holsum began to speak, I couldn’t help but notice that Liam’s desk was still empty. I told myself not to care. That it most likely had nothing to do with me. That he simply couldn’t resist the storming ocean swells, and he was ditching so he could stay out with his boys. Surfers around here often did that. Even teachers were known to call in sick on big surf days.

So him missing class had nothing to do with me or my antisocial behavior.

Except, somehow I knew that wasn’t true. He was genuinely worried about the guy behind all of this. And maybe even concerned about me. I could only hope he’d keep everything to himself. I didn’t want him to get involved with the messiness of my life. He didn’t deserve the whispers in the halls, the name-calling and speculation by the press, and he certainly didn’t deserve to be tangled up in a police investigation.

“Psst, Ruby,” Taylor whispered from her seat next to me. “Check this out.” She hit me with a rolled-up newspaper.

I took it from her unwillingly, if only to stop her from bludgeoning me with it, and leveled my eyes on her. I unrolled the paper and clenched my jaw in preparation for the real blow. The headline read “Ruby Rose: Withering from the Roots.”

Below the column header was a picture of me passed out on the cafeteria floor. And there was Liam with his bronzed triceps, holding me like a baby. I went from annoyed to humiliated to infuriated in a matter of seconds. My life was no longer my own, and now I was a joke, too. Taylor and her cheer cohort were snickering like a couple of playground bullies. And I never cared much for bullies.

Something snapped.

“You think this is funny?” I yelled at the suddenly snicker-less browbeaters.

“You think it’s OK to make fun of me right in front of my face?” I stood now, and the screech from my desk chair might as well have been a whistle telling everyone to look my way. I didn’t normally pick fights, but I knew how to win them.

“Ruby, is something the matter?” Mr. Holsum asked. He wouldn’t get here soon enough to stop me from heel-kicking Taylor’s front teeth out with my lovely Hermes sandals.

“We weren’t making fun of you,” Taylor said, so pathetically scared, so implausibly sincere. “I promise.”

“Oh yeah,” I said with a sneer I didn’t particularly like in myself. “What were you laughing at, then?”

“It’s Liam Slater we were
smiling
about,” her nameless friend piped up, scooting her chair away just in case I decided to strike. “He’s obviously so smitten with you. It’s just interesting is all.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded.

“He’s the only guy who’s ever turned Taylor down,” said Nameless Girl through her trembling, lip-glossed mouth as Taylor shot her a look of disgust. “We thought he was gay or something.”

I looked at the newspaper scrunched in my fist. I didn’t see “smitten.” I didn’t see “interesting.” I saw privacy being deleted from my list of rights.

“Please, girls, that’s enough.” Mr. Holsum’s voice sounded thin, just like his floppy comb-over. “Please, take your seats.”

I looked at the declawed kittens in front of me and felt like a fool. They were petrified of me. Everyone was staring. They were all waiting for my next dramatic move.

“Never mind,” I said, straightening my posture, then sitting back down. Even if Taylor was trying to humiliate or test me, it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be the first or last time, and, as usual, I couldn’t do anything about it. Other than ignore her.

I forced myself into a mindless coma for the next few hours. On autopilot, I planned to just get through the day and keep my head down until I could get my hands on some of the seriously strong Belgian chocolate stashed in the pantry at home. I focused on medicating myself with caffeine and getting to Dr. T’s office.

Until I remembered how she’d closed up on me last time, presumably for sharing too much information. Maybe I’d finally done it and destroyed my sanctuary—just like I’d destroyed everything else.

“I hear you almost got into a fight today,” Dr. T said calmly.

“Word travels fast.” I stared out my favorite square window at the surf whitewashing the sand. Relieved as I was that my sanctuary appeared to be intact, I didn’t feel like going so far as making eye contact. “Or is it that psychic thing again, and you
felt
the incident?”

“Your principal called me,” she said, pulling her chair closer. “
And
your mom.”

“All eyes on the withering Rose, eh?”

She released a small puff of air. “I’m a little worried. You’re exhibiting an abnormal amount of
acting out
right now,” Dr. T said carefully, with an
abnormal
amount of pausing. “Which is not altogether surprising considering the trauma you’ve experienced, but is nonetheless concerning.”

Ugh. I hated when she went all intellectual on me.

“Nothing happened. It was a misunderstanding, not acting out,” I argued, like maybe saying it out loud would make it true.

“You mean you didn’t take some kind of karate stance in front of two girls today?”

“Karate stance?” I asked. Had I done that?

“Listen,” she said with The Tone. Against my will, I relaxed. “I know you already know this, but violence is never the answer.”

I finally looked her in the eye for the first time today. “I know that. Do you think I’m out of control or something?”

“I think you always have a choice,” she said. “We always have a choice.”

I didn’t understand where she was going with this. “Are you saying I had a choice in shooting LeMarq? That I shouldn’t have done it? That I was out of control and made the wrong choice—”

“No, no, no,” she hushed me. “In that situation you made the right choice. I’ve told you over and over again that what you did was justified. I’m talking about other choices, those that will certainly come in the future.”

It felt like she was alluding to something important. She had an uncanny ability to know things she shouldn’t.

“What did my mom tell you?” I asked.

“That you received another message, and that you made the right choice again,” she assured me. “You were right to report the text. You were right to trust the police.”

“See, that’s where I don’t agree,” I argued. “It couldn’t have been right, because the girl is dead. Because of me.” I knew I shouldn’t have trusted ex-lover Martinez. Not only was he vindictive, but completely incompetent. He hadn’t even bothered to call and tell me who the girl was. I had to find it out through my own (less than totally legal) lunchtime research at the library. I held my head in my hands, unable to support it anymore.

Her name was Sarah Jennings. Fifteen years old. Wasn’t even reported missing, because her single mom was working a twenty-four-hour shift as a nurse last night. Only a freshman in high school, she’d never wear a prom dress, a graduation robe, a wedding gown. The terror she must have felt, the pain her mother must feel, the darkness of it all threatened to consume me as I allowed myself to—

“Ruby.” Dr. T’s voice felt awkwardly near. “Come back.”

She wasn’t just near. She was sitting next to me on the couch with one arm around me. “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose,” she said quietly.

“Huh?” I’d lost my bearings. Dr. T had never put her arm around me before. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s Emerson,” she said, pulling away to shine her headlight eyes on me. “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both.”

I wasn’t drinking her Very Cherry Kool-Aid. And I definitely wasn’t getting the message she was trying to send. Like the physical contact had created a spam filter and her message was just going to the junk file.

Normally, I liked to think of myself as a highly intelligent person, and not just because of the test scores. I wasn’t one of those book-smart-only kids who could barely interact socially or drive without pissing off the entire State of California. Most of the time I could read people, situations, scenarios—and act accordingly. In fact, after I founded the Constitution Society, some people started calling me the “young Jane Rose,” saying things like, “Maybe you’ll be the District Attorney one day, just like your mom.” Or, “I bet you make your mom so proud.” Of course that was all before Dad died and I resigned from
…
everything.

Still, I should have been smart enough to decipher whatever Dr. T was really trying to say to me. But no. Her arm around me clouded my ability to think straight.

Perhaps sensing my rising discomfort level, she moved back to her chair, giving me some breathing room.

“Rue, tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.

Yeah, right.

“You know I have always tried to be professional with you. You are my client, and you deserve to be treated with every level of respect and dedicated care. But”—she paused, and I felt a blow coming—“I care about you very much.”

That statement should have felt welcome, comforting. Instead, it felt loaded.

Dr. T didn’t have any children of her own. My mom had told me about her series of miscarriages and subsequent divorce. I supposed it was completely natural for her to care about me, especially since I felt the same way about her. But, for some reason, it felt heavy for her to finally voice it. “I know what I’m about to say now may be hard for you to hear, but I am going to say it anyway because it’s the
truth
.”

I took a deep Courage Breath, just like she’d taught me.

“It’s time for you to let your mom in. You need each other now like never before.”

Dr. T was right—that kind of advice was hard for me to hear. Wasn’t it Jane’s job, as the mother, to let
me
in? Not the other way around?

“You say that like it’s an easy thing to do,” I argued.

“I didn’t say it would be easy. In fact I know just how hard it will be. But it’s time.” Dr. T checked her watch as if she was beginning to check out.

Until now, I’d pretty much relied on her to be a sounding board and nonjudgmental third party when I needed to vent about various neuroses. But now that I’d killed someone, indirectly caused an innocent death, and trapped myself in my own lies and illegal obsessions, I really needed her.

“We’re going to end our session a few minutes early again today,” she said. “We’ll make up the time at another appointment.” She stood to escort me to the door. But she hadn’t even given me the chance to tell her about my mom’s affair. “I want you to give what I said a great deal of thought. Truth or repose—you can’t have both.”

I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. But maybe with some distance I’d figure it out.

“See you next week,” she said with a sympathetic nod. “Have a safe weekend.”

“You, too,” I said.

And she shut the door in my face.