Night Owls (27 page)

Relief rushed through me upon hearing his low voice. I wilted into a folding chair and answered, “At work, on a break.”

“Has your mom said anything to you today?”

“Not a word.”

“Think she’s serious about telling my folks?”

“If she catches me sneaking out to see you, yeah. She might do it. I’m so sorry, Jack. I didn’t mean to tell Heath.”

“Dammit, Bex. You were the only one who knew. I trusted you to keep it secret.”

He was angry with me? Worry tightened my chest and gummed up my throat. “It was after Jillian’s seizure, and I didn’t know if you were blowing me off, so I asked Heath for
advice. He just guessed because I’m a terrible liar, and I never thought he’d betray me—”

“What’s done is done,” he said.

I covered my eyes with hands, as if he could see me through the phone. “I’m
so sorry.
You’ve got to believe me.”

“Look, I have to go. I’ll think of something.”

“Jack—”

He’d already hung up.

DREADED GOING HOME AFTER MY SHIFT. MOM
wasn’t working, which made me anxious that she’d be waiting for me. Usually on days like these,
she’d hold off eating dinner until I got back, and even if it was just salad or the Ultimate Sin (what she dubbed homemade guacamole and chips when we sometimes ate it as a meal), we’d
watch something trashy on the DVR and eat together.

That wouldn’t be happening tonight, not after everything I’d said to her. But it wasn’t like I could just text and say I was going out. My sneaking-around days were over. So I
kept my head down and strode into my room, quickening my pace when I heard movement in the kitchen. But before I could hunker down and wall myself away, her footsteps stopped outside my door.

“Hey,” she said, pushing inside as I stripped out of my jacket.

“Hey.”

Something bounced on my bed. I glanced up to see my sketchbook of Minnie.

“You can finish up your work in the anatomy lab,” she said. “But that’s not a license to run around wherever you please afterward. Just to the lab and back
home.”

I was a little shocked. I tried to answer, but it came out as a grunt.

“Dinner’s in the kitchen,” she added, and then walked out. I listened to her shuffling back to her room, and the door closed.

Whatever small hope this gave me was crushed when Jack called me again later that night in lieu of our usual good-night texts. My heart raced as I answered the phone.

“I can’t talk long,” he said in a rush. “Mom’s coming back any second.”

“Okay.”

“I told them.”

“What?”

“I told them about the graffiti.”

“Oh no. Jack? Why?”

“It was time.”

“What did they say?”

“Mom cried, which sucked. Dad is furious. At first I thought he was going to make me turn myself in to the police, but he wouldn’t want the bad publicity. Now he’s threatening
to send me to a boarding school in Massachusetts for my senior year.”

“What?” Surely this was a joke or some kind of invented cover-up story, like Jillian being sent to boarding school in Europe. Only . . . it wasn’t.

“Some elitist prep school,” he said angrily. “It’s a gateway to Ivy League colleges, but I don’t want to go to Harvard or MIT, and I can’t leave San
Francisco. God only knows how Jillian will react—she doesn’t do well with change, and Dad knows that. I can’t believe he would even consider it. But I guess it’s what he
does with everything he doesn’t know how to handle. He shoves it out of sight. First Jillian, now me.”

“This can’t be happening,” I whispered. “This is all my fault.”

“Hey stop that. It’s not. I’m glad I told them. It feels like a weight off my shoulders. And I’m not mad, so don’t even think that. You hear me? I’m sorry I
got upset earlier. I was just shocked. But I did this for both of us, so your mom can’t hold it against you. I thought it would help, but I guess it only screwed things up even
more.”

I suppressed tears and sagged against the headboard of my bed. “Oh, Jack.”

“You are the only thing good in my life. If he forces me to move across the country . . . ? Jesus, Bex. I’m already dying over here. One day apart from you feels like an eternity.
What will happen if I can’t see you for months?”

Months. I couldn’t even fathom it, but I already felt the potential loss impaling my chest, a hint of things to come.

IT HAD BEEN WEEKS SINCE I’D POSTED ON THE
BODY-O-RAMA
blog. Not to sound tragic, but in a way, it was pretty much the only outlet I had
for conversation right now, because no one else was talking to me. Well, Jack would if he could, but before he hung up the previous night, he’d warned me that his parents were watching his
every move, and they knew about his trick with their home security cameras. They were also threatening to monitor his texts. In a way, I guess I was happy for once that I paid for my own phone. Mom
couldn’t shut it down or anything.

With all this hanging over me, I drew a quick sketch of a human heart and added diagram labels for all the parts. It was no Max Brödel—I’ll tell you that much. And maybe because
it was so sketchy, or maybe because my life had been upended, I dug through the bottom of my wardrobe and found my plastic tub of Prismacolors. The scent of wood and wax wafted out when I opened
the lid. I sharpened the Scarlet Lake pencil and, blowing out a long breath, set the lead against the paper.

I only meant to outline what I’d already done, but half an hour passed, and I’d softly shaded the contours of my entire sketch. I was worried all that color would look garish, but it
wasn’t so bad.

“Imagine that, Lester,” I said to my one-armed skeleton.

A few snips in the shape of a square, and the heart, along with its diagram labels, was neatly unmoored from the paper. I carefully ripped it in two and pasted the pieces on a sheet of black
paper. Done. Before I could chicken out or second-guess anything, I slapped it on my desktop scanner and uploaded the file under my BioArtGirl profile with only the date and time for a title. And,
you know, it actually made me feel a little better.

That night Mom wasn’t working, so she dropped me off at the anatomy lab and told me she’d be back to pick me up at 8:00 p.m. She didn’t add “sharp” to the end of
that, but I felt the implication clearly enough.

We were communicating only on a need-to-know basis, but at least that was better than screaming at each other, and it was certainly more communication than Heath and I had. Conveniently, he was
spending the night at Noah’s. Mom told me this—not him. She also told me Heath had set a move-out date: the day after my art show.

I didn’t see Simon Gan in the anatomy lab lobby, but after I’d signed in and clipped on my visitor’s badge, I headed into the cadaver room and spotted him in his usual spot. He
saw me putting my stuff down and waved. The stand I used to prop up my sketchpad wasn’t around, but several extra ones sat across the room. I headed over to retrieve one but stopped when I
noticed that something was . . . off.

Laid out on Minnie’s metal table was the body of a skinny old man. His leg had been opened up for dissection near a pair of bloated testicles.

“Miss Adams,” Simon called out.

“There’s been a mistake,” I answered, scanning the other sheet-covered bodies. “This isn’t Minnie.”

He stopped on the other side of the cadaver and caught his breath. “That’s what I was going to tell you. Minnie was cremated two days ago. This is Mickey.”

“Cremated? Why?”

“They were finished dissecting her, and she’d been in the lab for nine months. It was her time.”

“But I wasn’t finished,” I argued. “How come no one told me?”

“I asked Dr. Sheridan’s assistant to let you know, just in case you wanted to be there for the cremation.”

“I never got an email.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, looking genuinely apologetic. “But look at the bright side. At least this new body will give you someone different to draw.”

I didn’t want someone new. I wanted Minnie. I wasn’t finished! And who was this guy, anyway? Mickey? I didn’t know him. He was old and gross, and he stank strongly of
formaldehyde. I didn’t want to invent a new backstory for his life, and I didn’t want to draw the dissection of his leg. It felt like a blasphemy—a slap in the face to Minnie.

Tears blurred my vision. I snatched up my things and raced out of the lab. I didn’t stop running until I’d taken the stairs down, story after story after story, and finally ended up
on the building’s front lawn, planting myself against the tree where Jack had taught me the breathing trick. And I fell to pieces.

My project was unfinished.

My entry for the art show was shot.

What the hell was I going to do? I had only a week. One week! And the unfinished drawing of Minnie had taken me an entire freaking month.

Everything was shit. Two days earlier, I’d been in Jack’s arms, satisfied and happy. Now I’d had my freedom snatched away, my brother had betrayed my trust, Mom and I were
barely speaking, and my boyfriend might be sent to another planet—which is about how close Massachusetts felt.

And now this?

In a rage, I grabbed the sketchbook out of my bag and tore out pages.
Rip!
Sketches from the first day in the lab when I’d gotten sick in the bushes.
Rip!
All my
preliminary drawings.
Rip! Rip! Rip!
Detailed studies, experimental angles, and the final sketch. I crumpled up the expensive French-milled drawing paper that had cost me several
days’ salary and sloppily pitched it at the bushes. People stared. I yelled obscenities at one person, until I realized how banana-boat crazy I sounded, all emotional and dramatic.

Like Heath.

Or my father.

The empty sketchpad fell from my hand. I leaned back against the itchy bark of the tree and stared blankly at the lengthening shadows on the closely shorn grass, now littered with torn pieces of
Minnie’s body. Plump birds pecked at the paper, searching for food. Students strolled up and down the sidewalk behind me.

When my breathing had slowed so much that I was practically meditating, I got out my phone to see what time it was. Mom wouldn’t be there to pick me up for another half hour. Out of habit,
emotionally numb and hollow as a beach ball, I checked my email. A comment waited for me at
Body-O-Rama
.

I clicked the link and was surprised anew at the bright Scarlet Lake in my depressing heart sketch—did I really do that?—and scrolled down past my BioArtGirl profile to read the
single-line comment from a newly created profile, RockabillyBoy. It said:

I stared at that line in wonderment. And as if the words themselves had power enough to create change, an idea bloomed inside my head.

MOM SAYS I’M STUBBORN, AND MAYBE THAT’S TRUE.
But she also taught me not to blindly follow rules without thinking. Not everything in this
world is fair, and people with power don’t always have sense.

If I had anything to add to that, I’d say that even good people make bad mistakes (like Mom lying about Dad, which I could forgive her for). And sometimes good people break the rules, like
Jack and his golden words—which his parents had to forgive him for, too. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but if they looked at it logically, they’d eventually understand that he was doing
it for the right reason.

It was a Noble Defiance.

And that’s why I came to the realization that the lesson I’d learned from the jumbled mess of recent events was not that sneaking around was wrong. Sneaking around for the wrong
reasons, sure. But sneaking around for the right reasons? That was a Noble Defiance. And that’s why Mom continued to let me go the anatomy lab, because she knew I’d been doing it for
the right reason.

That’s also why I didn’t tell her about Minnie’s being cremated. I just quietly picked up my ripped drawing paper, fattened it all out, and crammed the pages back into my
sketchpad. And when I got into the paddy wagon, Mom pulled away from the curb and asked, “How did it go?”

“I’ve had a small setback,” I told her. “But I know what to do to fix it.”