Put Me Back Together (7 page)

It might have sounded like a command, but the expression on his face was hopeful, as though he thought I might say no, which wasn’t too far off. I held my arm tightly at my side, eyeing his phone doubtfully. Give him my number? I never gave out my number. In fact, I was always forgetting my own number for just that reason. Nobody had it except Emily, my parents, Mariella—she’d finagled it out of me on the same day she’d insisted we exchange keys, in case of emergency—and an aggressive girl named Lara I’d sort of been friends with for a few weeks first semester. She’d never called me.

Giving out my number to a guy was something I did not do. It broke every one of my rules. It was the sort of thing Emily did, the sort of thing normal girls did. I didn’t want to start pretending I was a girl like that, a girl guys called on the phone and invited over, a girl who deserved that kind of attention. I didn’t want to give him my number and be heartbroken when he never used it.

This wasn’t wise. This wasn’t safe. This wasn’t the Katie Archer I knew.

But then again, the Katie Archer I knew would never have been asked for her number by a guy like Lucas.

I’m pretty sure I imagined Lucas’s sigh of relief as I finally took the phone from his hand and typed in my name and number, but I know I didn’t imagine the gigantic grin that covered his face as I handed it back.

Having no idea what to do next, I turned and walked to the corner and crossed the street without checking to see if he was following me. When I reached the other curb, I looked back. He was still on the other side of the street, looking down at his phone.

“Hey, Lucas,” I called. He looked up. “Thanks for the brownie.”

He smiled and continued typing on his phone. My cell vibrated in my hand and I turned it on.

Lucas: Thanks for today. :)

By the time I finished my classes for the day and was on my way back to my apartment, my mind was a jumble of contradictory thoughts. I remembered my conviction as I’d left for school that morning that I would forget about Lucas altogether. Obviously I’d failed at that completely, but instead of feeling afraid and guilty about it, I could only feel warm and excited. All through my English class I’d kept turning on my phone to check his text—yes, I’d devolved to this kind of high school behaviour—and each time a giddy feeling swept through my body and I had to stop myself from giggling. Then, of course, had come art class, three long hours of me sneaking looks at Lucas only to find that, more often than not, he was looking back. There was still a scolding voice that ran on a continual loop in the back of my head, listing all the reasons why being friends with this boy—and I couldn’t really think of us as anything more than friends without feeling like I might pass out—was the very worst idea, a monumentally stupid idea, the most idiotic idea I’d ever had. For once, that voice sounded muted and hardly worth listening to.

I trudged into my room and threw myself down on my bed, startling the cat, who’d been sleeping on my pillow. Before I could reach out and pet him he’d hightailed it back under the dresser. On another day I might have felt dismayed at the cat’s rejection—he’d yet to show even the slightest interest in me—but right now I could only sit, still gripping my phone, wondering what this carefree feeling was.

Then I realized: I was happy.

My cell made a dinging sound that meant I had a new email waiting.

I clicked on my phone, opened my mailbox, and waited for the message to load, expecting it to be from Em. Probably some ridiculous video of people dancing in the rain wearing fake goat heads or something. She loved it when people wore animal heads for some unknowable reason.

But the email wasn’t from Emily. It was notification telling me someone had sent me a Facebook message.

This was a little odd. I barely used my Facebook page and had only created it in the first place because my little cousin, Harriet, who was nine, had insisted I try it once, just to see if I liked it, then immediately friended me. My profile picture was still blank. The whole concept of social media confounded me. Why would anyone care that I’d had a really great sandwich at Earl’s Kitchen, or that I’d stubbed my toe on the corner of the coffee table and it hurt like hellllll? Harriet and Emily were my only friends on there and neither of them had ever sent me a message before.

None of this really occurred to me as I opened the email, however. My thoughts were elsewhere—on the good day I’d had. On Lucas and the fact that he’d called me beautiful and asked for my number. On the fact that I was happy.

When I glanced down at the message, my face froze in its happy, grinning state, as though it was trying to keep those feelings for as long as possible, as though my face knew before I did that I would never be able to keep my happiness. Happiness wasn’t meant for me.

You’d better watch yourself, Katie Kat.
I remember everything.

5

“Why does your closet think you’re Amish?” Emily cried.

I was sitting crossed-legged on my bed, calmly eating chocolate chips out of the package by the handful as my sister rifled through my clothes, her entire upper body out of sight inside my closet. As I watched, she began throwing my shoes over her shoulder, one “disturbing” sandal at a time.

“Where’s the top I gave you for your birthday?” she demanded.

“That bright pink thing with the sequins?” I asked. “I cleverly hid that abomination away.”

“Don’t talk to me about abominations!” Em said, disentangling her head from one of my dresses, her cheeks rosy red with annoyance. “Your wardrobe is the abomination. What did you and Mom buy when you went clothes shopping for school last fall, anyway?”

“Those shoes,” I said, pointing to a pair of brown ballet flats Emily had rejected only moments ago, “and those jeans.”

She was holding the jeans up in front of her; they were my most comfortable, baggy jeans. The legs were twice the width of her body. She looked up at me in horror as I spoke.

Depositing them on the ground with her fingers as though she thought they might infect her with bad fashion sense, she flopped down on the bed next to me and gave an exaggerated sigh.

“I knew I should have brought some clothes for you to wear. We’re never going to get there at this rate,” she whined.

That didn’t sound too bad to me. In fact, it sounded great. After three straight days of obsessing over that Facebook message nonstop, I was exhausted. The first night I hadn’t slept at all. It had taken me a full hour to get the pounding of my heart under control, and another hour to convince myself to stop checking the chain lock and bolt on my apartment door every five seconds. I’d never thought two sentences could make me feel so unsafe, but they had. As the long hours had stretched toward morning, I couldn’t stop staring at those last two words printed boldly across the screen. It wasn’t that some stranger was threatening me—that wasn’t what had me so freaked. I knew exactly who the message was from.

Only one person called me Katie Kat.

But how? I knew Brandon couldn’t have sent it—I’d looked up the rules on internet access for youth offenders in custody somewhere around two o’clock in the morning—though I figured it was possible he’d snuck onto a computer somehow and sent the message from the account he’d created with the name “Somebody You Know.” I didn’t even want to think about the alternative, that he had help, a buddy out here in the world, a friend willing to do his bidding. A friend free to go anywhere, do anything, without the restriction of the bars that held Brandon in. A friend whose face I wouldn’t recognize if I passed him on the street. A friend who could be anyone: the guy, or girl, sitting next to me in class, the guy having a cigarette outside my apartment building, my mailman, my professor, Mariella.

You’d better watch yourself, Katie Kat.

I hadn’t left the apartment in three days.

Logically I knew there probably wasn’t anything to worry about. Brandon was locked away; he couldn’t hurt me. The message was just an empty threat. It was incredibly unlikely that he had a friend on the outside loyal enough to travel across the country just to find me. But then, there were a lot of things about my relationship with Brandon that were unlikely. The truth was, I had no idea what Brandon was capable of these days. I had absolutely nothing to go on, and nothing, unlike something, left room for my imagination to come up with a thousand different possibilities, each one more terrifying than the last. I’d always had an active imagination. It was what fueled my art. I’d never thought of it as a curse until now.

So I’d hidden away in my apartment, painting and skipping class and eating every single thing in my fridge, including a Tupperware container full of pasta I was pretty sure was two weeks old, a shriveled peach, and the healthy cereal I’d bought after I’d watched the documentary about how fast food was killing us all and had never opened.

I’d forgotten that I’d agreed to go out with Em and her friends—it was someone’s birthday; I couldn’t remember whose—until she’d texted me saying she was on her way over. I’d only just managed to change out of my pajama uniform when she’d knocked on the door.

“You know, I think I might be coming down with something,” I said, giving what I hoped sounded like a pathetic cough.

Emily was texting and didn’t even notice.

“It’s okay,” she said with audible relief. “Sally says she can bring you something to wear.”

Oh, wonderful. I’d seen the type of outfits Slutty Sally normally wore. (To give you a hint, she’d given herself that nickname.) We’d once had to force her to go back to her room and change when she’d come outside wearing underwear instead of shorts. They were boy-short undies, but still. I’d also once seen her nipple in a disastrous cleavage incident.

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said to Em.

“What?” she said, oblivious to my discomfort, still busily texting on her phone.

Close as we were, Emily had never been great at sensing how I was feeling. Maybe because I hid my true feelings from her, as I did everyone else. But even if I’d been in full-blown panic attack mode, I wasn’t sure she would have really understood. Dark feelings didn’t really exist in my sister’s world; I’d worked hard enough to keep it that way. Emily had never been depressed, sick to her stomach with fear, or even lonely as far as I could tell. How could she possibly understand the tremulous emotions that coursed through my body on a regular basis? Which was why I was pretty shocked at the words that came out of her mouth next.

“Are you okay?” she asked, glancing up from the glowing screen of her cell phone. “You just seem a little off today. Is anything the matter?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, digging farther into my package of chocolate chips. It was almost empty, which meant I’d eaten the entire bag in one sitting—gah!

“Mom wanted me to ask,” she said. “She’s always asking me about you. Have you been avoiding her calls? Because you know that only makes her manic.”

Well, that explained it. This was all my mother’s doing.

“I guess I must have missed them,” I said, throwing the empty wrapper in the garbage. A part of me wanted Em to call me on my crap. (How could you miss a call and not realize it when your cell phone yelled this information at you whenever you turned it on?) A part of me wanted Em to realize why Mom was calling constantly to check on me. A part of me wanted my sister to remember the date on the calendar and realize what it meant.

But Emily was Emily, and I knew deep down that I wouldn’t have wanted her to be any other way.

“They’re here!” she cried, bouncing off the bed and down the hall, our conversation forgotten.

I heard her yank the door open and the racket of a gaggle of girls crowding into the small space of my living room.

I lay back on my bed and enjoyed my last ten seconds of quiet. Maybe this night would be good for me. I’d be surrounded by people I knew the entire time. I wouldn’t be alone. I could pretend I was someone else for a night, pretend I was my sister and had no problems, no demons, no worries. I could escape the funky smell in my apartment. I could get away from myself.

Then Sally burst into my room, the other girls on her heels, holding up a sheer black top with a plunging neckline and a pair of knee-high leather boots.

“It’s time for a makeover, girlfriend!” she cried, her blonde curls bouncing.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the cat easing out from under the dresser and stealthily slipping out of the room. I’d never wished I were a cat so much in my entire life.