The Predicteds (21 page)

While the argument builds, I finally get into a stall and lock the door securely. Long after I'm done going to the bathroom, I wait it out until I can no longer hear Brooklyn or Cuteny or Dizzy. When I emerge, the bathroom is almost empty. A park employee with a surgeon's mask and rubber gloves is mopping the floor. “Gross,” I say. She nods. Kelly is washing her hands at the sink next to me.

Outside the bathroom, the air is fresh. Even burned popcorn smells better than the dank smell of a park bathroom. Kelly follows me out the door. Nate is waiting for her. I give him a half-pity smile, my penance for making judgments about people when I shouldn't have, and then I breathe in heavily, turning to walk toward the gift shop. Brooklyn and Cuteny block me when I walk past the giant scale where a scary-looking park employee wants to try to guess my weight. For a small fee. “Come on,” he yells at nobody in particular. Dizzy stands behind the other two girls, looking like she is ready to flee. She gives me an apologetic look.

Brooklyn: “I told you it was her. I saw her in the bathroom. She just stood there and watched that fat chick barf. Practically
on
me. She didn't even warn me.”

Cuteny: “Figures.”

Brooklyn: “I suppose you think this is funny.”

I don't answer.

Brooklyn: “Fine. Don't say anything. But I want to say something to you, Daphne. I know you and Jesse had something to do with what happened to January. I don't care if the police cleared Jesse. I don't care if Jesse has left the state and gone to live with his mother. I don't care that January insists it wasn't Jesse who did it. I don't care that she doesn't know what actually happened. I know the truth. We all know the truth. You can't trust a Lifer. And you can't trust a Lifer lover either. Look at you, all best friends with Kelly—someone who has probably already stolen your wallet!”

She yells the last part at me, flinging the words at me like rotten tomatoes. Some people stop to watch us. I hear someone murmur nervously, “There's a predicted here? Where?” Instinctively, people huddle together. “I thought the QH predicteds weren't allowed here today.”

“They
aren't
allowed,” someone else says. Nate and Kelly stand behind me, as if I am their bodyguard, an African native hired to lead them through a dangerous safari.

Josh appears with a giant bowl of orange-colored nachos in his hands. “What's shakin', bacon?” he asks, chip shards spewing out his mouth.

“Hi, honey,” Dizzy says and wraps her arms around his waist. When she unwraps herself, he hands her the nachos.

“What's going on, Gormley?” Josh asks menacingly.

Nate holds up both hands. “We were just leaving,” he says. He doesn't seem scared, just anxious to get away. I wonder again about Josh's story—about Nate pulling a gun on him at the Zoo on Monday. Nate got suspended for that, even without evidence of a gun.

Brooklyn addresses Nate and Kelly now. “Nobody wants you here. Nobody wants you anywhere. I don't know why they don't just lock people like you up. I hope they do. Why should we have to wait until you hurt someone? And Daphne, you're just pathetic.”

I look to Dizzy for help.
Please?
I say with my eyes.

She looks away.
What can I do?
she seems to be saying.

Cuteny: “I can't believe we let you into our group, Daphne. We were, like, friends with you. And all along, you were like this predicted-loving person. How could you?”

Brooklyn: “I never had a problem with you. Not even when you got Josh in trouble at the diner. But I cannot tolerate a person who knowingly aids and abets criminals!”

It takes all of my strength to just walk away.

I find Melissa spinning a rack of sunglasses inside the shop. “Take me home,” I say. “Please, take me home. I'm done with class trips.”

“Oh, thank god you said that,” she says. “I can't hand out water for one second longer.”

“Aren't you the chaperone?”

“They'll live without me.”

***

The phone rings late Saturday morning. “I'll get it,” I yell, assuming that it's a telemarketer. I'm that desperate for social interaction.

“Daphne?” a small voice says when I answer.

“Yes?”

“Do you want to come over?”

I still have no idea who it is.

“Ah…” I rack my brain, trying to place the voice. “January?”

“I'm back from the hospital. Home.” She sounds different—not her usual brazen self, but like a broken little girl.

“Do you want to hang out at my house?” she asks again. “We have the pool uncovered now. We can lay out.”

“Is it warm outside?” I flip up my blinds and peer outside. I squint against the sun.

“Great,” she says enthusiastically. She appears to think I've agreed to come over.

I show up exactly one hour later, wearing black shorts and a red tank top. My old one-piece swimsuit is in my bag.

January points two fingers at me when she sees me. She looks like a flight attendant pointing out the illuminated exits. “Daphne!” She limps toward me. Her hair is even shorter now—she looks younger, more breakable. She doesn't look like a girl who got pregnant or who got drunk and passed out on a dirty frat house floor. She looks like someone who could break in the wind. She's wearing blue Old Navy shorts and a T-shirt, and her limbs look scrawny and bony. Her arm is in a cast covered with signatures and smiley faces.

“January,” I say. “How are you?”

She throws her good arm around me. “I'm doing summer school,” she says when we are apart, as if I'd asked her that question. “I'm not going back the rest of this year. So I need to finish in the summer. I think that's better. I can't go to the Zoo.” She grimaces. “I've heard all about it. And I might need tutors for every subject next year anyway. Doctors don't know how much of the damage is permanent. Lots of head trauma,” she says, pointing to her face, and I can see now that it is tinted bluish, the same color as her shorts.

We stand there awkwardly until she invites me to sit down on the water-stained deck chairs. She moves slowly, and I can tell it's hard for her to bend her body. We sit on the edge of the cement to let our feet dangle in the pool.

“Are you okay?” I ask, realizing too late that she is probably not okay.

“I guess. It's all just so weird.” She starts talking about the attack just as if we were talking about the weather. She hands me a Diet Coke from the cooler next to her. “The last thing I remember about that night is going to the party. I just needed to escape. Then I remember waking up in that disgusting train car. Everyone thought it was Jesse, you know.”

“I know,” I say, not bothering to point out that it was all anyone could talk about when she was in the hospital. All anyone can
still
talk about. My skin feels like it's boiling under the intense sun.

“You thought so too, didn't you?”

I don't answer.

“That's what bothered him the most—that you believed he was capable of this.” She waves her hand in front of herself, holding her cast toward me. “He could never do this.” It's exactly what he had told me himself.

I nod.

“The police couldn't find any evidence that it was him. None.”

I nod again. A lot of people in Quiet believe that this just means Jesse covered his tracks well. The newspaper is full of letters to the editor written by people who think Jesse is getting away with murder. Or attempted murder.

Hillary comes out of the sliding doors to join us—she's carrying a book and a Jonas Brothers beach towel. “Jan, do you have to go through all of this again? Can't you talk about something nice?”

“Like ponies?” January asks. “Hilly, go get us a snack.”

“If I do, will you stop talking about this stuff?”

“Yes,” January says. “Now, go! And tell Mom to stop hovering!” She turns to me, “She can't stop waiting on me.”

When the sliding screen door slams shut and Hillary has disappeared, January leans over and says quietly, “I just want you to know that it wasn't his.”

I know what she is talking about. I stare up at the sky, hoping for a shimmering cloud to cover part of the sun.

“The pregnancy. The baby. Dizzy told you, didn't she? It wasn't his. Jesse and I were never like that, if you know what I mean. But I didn't want him to tell the real story. He let everyone believe it was him, that the baby was his. I asked him not to tell anyone. Not even you. And he took a lot of heat from everyone, including my own brother, but he never said a word to anyone. He kept my secrets.”

Through the slats of the fence, I can see the next-door neighbor, a fat man wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. He's putting hamburgers on a grill. Saturday lunch.

“Why? Why so many secrets?”

She smiles weakly and pushes her hair behind her ears. She crosses her arms and taps her fingers delicately on her cast.

“It's a long story, Daphne.”

“Will you tell me?”

The man starts whistling, warbling off key, a hissing sound accompanying every breath he takes. I know the tune from Grandma's old big band records: “Pennsylvania 6-500.” Why
not
reveal secrets here?

“Actually, I guess it's not a
long
story. It's more like a very
complicated
story. But you need to know something. Jesse had nothing to do with any of the things that happened to me. Nothing.”

In the sunlight, in the Morrisons' backyard, January doesn't seem like that weird girl I first met in the library. She seems like a fragile Barbie doll, the kind that you can pop the head off of, if you aren't careful.

“I know,” I say confidently. I say it loudly. But I'm saying it too late to the wrong person.

“There was no reason for me
not
to get pregnant, you know.” She looks behind her to be sure that Hillary is still in the house. “I mean, if it was going to happen, why not happen now? Why prolong the agony? Same thing with the alcohol. Why not drink it all now and just get it over with? That's what I was thinking. In case you were wondering.”

I lean back on the cement, feeling the pleasant sting of the sun on the back of my legs. I
was
wondering. I did want to know why January would do these things to herself.

“That's the thing I just haven't figured out,” she says, shifting in her chair, holding her casted arm away from her. “If I hadn't have made those things happen, would they have happened anyway?”

“I don't know,” I say, and I truly don't. Do things happen no matter what you do to prevent them from happening? Is there some immutable law of the universe that prohibits us from veering off the course of destiny?

“I'm really sorry for what my brother did,” January says. She looks sad, but she doesn't cry.

“I can't imagine what this has been like for you. For your whole family.”

January laughs eerily. “Fortunately, my mom can just tune out anything that she doesn't want to think about. As far as she's concerned, my brother never existed. And my problems? Well, she blames my dad for those. Bad genes. Hilly is her one last hope.”

“That must be hard.” I don't know what else to say.

January swats at a fly lazily buzzing above her face. “I don't want to forget that he existed. He's still my brother.”

There's nothing I can say to that—nothing that could possibly make her feel better.

She crosses her ankles. “I still don't remember much. It's weird. If it weren't for this cast”—she holds up her arm as far as she can—“and the bruises, I wouldn't know anything had happened to me. One minute I was at that stupid frat party with you—I remember that—and the next, I was at the hospital with everyone hovering over me.” She looks out at the pool. We hear the fat hamburger man softly swearing at his grill. “But lately, I've started remembering things.”

“About that night?”

“Well, not so much remembering as just kind of knowing. You know? Like I just kind of know things.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know, like, little details. A red shirt. There was a red shirt. And I close my eyes and see a bat—a baseball bat. But that might just be because the police keep saying that the guy who did it had a bat. Then there's a tattoo.”

“What kind of tattoo?”

“I can see it when I close my eyes.” She does that now. “A tattoo. But not like on someone—just a disembodied tattoo, floating around out there.” She waves her good hand in front of her. “One that you wouldn't expect, like a tattoo of a cartoon character or something. Isn't that weird? That something like this could happen, and all I remember is, like, a shirt and a tattoo?”

“Have you told anyone? Have you told the police?”

“Nah. I'm not even sure what it all means. You're the first person I've told.”

We both lie back and close our eyes until hamburger guy calls, “Come and get it,” to his lunch guests, wherever they are. I can only see parts of him through the fence slats.

“Did it make you feel like a different person?” I ask, “When you found out you were predicted?”

“I
was
a different person.”

“You think people can change, though, right?” I say this persistently, hopefully.

“We are who we are.” It's not what I wanted to hear her say. “I'm trapped in my biology,” she says, miming being trapped in a box. “You are the lucky one. Trust me.”

“Daphne?” she asks a little bit later when I'm almost asleep.

“Yeah?”

“His name was Tommy.”

I know without asking that she's talking about her brother.

“I don't think he was all bad. I think somebody could've helped him. But nobody did. Not even me.”