Trial by Fire (3 page)

“What’s wrong?” came Juliet’s immediate response.

“Mom’s having a bad day,” Lily said, not at all surprised that her sister already knew something was out of place. The two sisters often joked that their phones were so used to making emergency calls that they had somehow learned how to ring more urgently when there was trouble. Lily walked over to the refrigerator and checked her mom’s meds.

“Did she get loose again?” Juliet asked.

“No,” Lily replied thankfully as she counted her mom’s pills. “She just decided to make a few pots. But she neglected to take the car out of the garage first.”

“Fantastic.” Juliet paused. She and Lily started laughing at the same time. “How bad is it?”

“Oh, it’s pretty impressive, Jules.” Lily finished counting the pills. “I just checked, and she took all her meds today, so we’ll have to talk to the doctors about her dosage again. I can clean up the mess myself, but I’m worried about leaving her alone tonight. And I have this thing.”

“A date?” Juliet practically screamed with excitement.

“Sort of.” Lily felt her cheeks heat with a blush. “Tristan’s taking me to a party.”

“A party.” Juliet sighed heavily. “Lily, are you sure about that? With all the hair products and perfume that the girls will be wearing, and the alcohol and smoke?”

“Can you come or not?” Lily asked quietly. “It would mean a lot to me.”

Juliet paused. “We’ll talk about the party when I get there,” she said, and ended the call.

Lily decided to start on the Jeep first. Her dad’s spot could wait. It wasn’t like he’d be coming home that night anyway.

Technically, Lily’s parents weren’t divorced, but her father had pretty much abandoned the family about the time her mother started wandering around sleepy Salem, screaming at everyone to shut up. James had hung in there for a few years. Lily was in eighth grade when her allergy symptoms started escalating exponentially and, as luck would have it, at around the same time Samantha began accosting people at the grocery store. She’d started walking right up to people, telling them she knew about the affair they were having, the bankruptcy they were hiding, or the Adderall they were stealing from their kids to lose weight.

Sometimes she was right, and sometimes she wasn’t. When she was wrong, she simply said that another “version” of the person she’d accused had done what she’d said. Samantha caused a lot of trouble for some good people, but she’d downright humiliated anyone with the last name Proctor. In a small community like Salem, having a crazy mother was not something that was easily overlooked. By the time Juliet went to college two years ago, it seemed like all of Salem had turned on the Proctor family and wanted to run them out of town.

That’s when James stopped coming home most nights. He couldn’t take the embarrassment of being married to the town kook, but he knew that if he filed for divorce he’d end up getting burdened with Lily. No court would grant Samantha custody of a minor with as many medical problems as Lily had, and James didn’t like sickness, either mental or physical. He didn’t file for divorce or involve the legal system in any way because he knew he would end up with more responsibility. Instead, he just stopped showing up.

Lily filled a bucket with soap and water and opened the garage door so she could let out the fumes of the cleaning goop while she scrubbed. Even the non-toxic stuff her mom bought at Whole Foods still irritated Lily if she was around it in it’s undiluted form for too long. Ten minutes later, her eyes were watering from the chemicals so badly she could barely see. She ignored them. She had a party to go to, damn it, and after everything that had already happened that day, a couple of leaky eyes weren’t about to stop her. Another twenty minutes later, she was mostly done with the Jeep, when she heard Juliet’s car pull into the driveway and park.

“You know what? The way the clay’s all flung out like that, it almost looks festive,” her sister said from the garage door.

“I’ll be your best friend if you check on Mom,” Lily said, wiping her hair off her damp forehead.

“Fever?” Juliet crossed the garage to Lily. Her giant brown eyes were rounded with concern. Lily edged away from her sister’s smooth, cool hands before Juliet could touch her face.

“Just warm from all this exercise,” Lily said.

Juliet cocked her chin as she judged Lily’s health. The gesture accentuated the heart shape of her face, and as she pursed her naturally red lips with worry, Lily thought, as she always did, that Juliet’s mouth looked like a heart inside a heart—a small red one inside a larger, pale one. Lily knew most people considered her sister a bit plain. Juliet dressed conservatively and never wore makeup or styled her straight, mousy-brown hair. But to Lily that stuff was irrelevant. She thought her sister was the prettiest girl she’d ever seen.

“Check on Mom. I’m awesome.” Lily turned Juliet by the shoulders and gave her a playful kick on the rump to get her to go inside.

When Lily finished, she found her sister sitting in bed with their mom, taking her pulse. At twenty, Juliet was already a registered EMT and moonlighted at a hospital to pay her way through Boston University. Sometimes it seemed like everyone closest to Lily had decided at an early age that it would be a good idea to go into medicine—probably because at some point they’d seen paramedics fighting to keep Lily breathing. That kind of experience tends to leave a lasting impression on a kid.

“How is she?” Lily whispered when her sister looked up. Juliet tilted her head to the side in a noncommittal gesture before easing herself off the bed and taking Lily out to the hall.

“Her pulse is racing. Which is kind of hard to do when you have two hundred milligrams of Thorazine and an Ambien in you.”

“Is she alright alone?”

“She’s fine for now,” Juliet whispered, her big eyes downcast.

“Did she say what’s bothering her?” Lily asked. She took Juliet’s arm and led her down the hall to her room.

“She’s paranoid.” Juliet sighed as she sat on Lily’s bed. “She said another Lillian was planning on taking
her
Lillian.”

“That’s—” Lily stopped, overwhelmed.

“—the way she explains her hallucinations to herself,” Juliet finished for her. “The hallucinations aren’t wrong if they really happen
somewhere
. She isn’t crazy if there are multiple versions of people and multiple worlds that only she knows about.”

“Yeah.” Lily agreed reluctantly. Something about this explanation bothered her. She knew her mom made stuff up, but how had she known about Miranda nearly starting a fight with her in the hallway? It hadn’t happened, but it almost had. It certainly could have happened if one or two things had worked out differently. “But it’s spooky how close to true her lies sound sometimes.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“And it keeps getting weirder.”

“Schizophrenia is a degenerative disease.”

Juliet said things like that sometimes. It wasn’t to edify Lily, who already knew the ins and outs of their mom’s condition. It was to remind herself that no matter how much of a nightmare all of this seemed, it was still considered normal in some textbook somewhere. Feigning normalcy didn’t help Lily much. Cracking a joke usually did, though.

“Ah, schizophrenia. The gift that keeps on giving.”

Neither of them laughed, but they both smiled sadly and nodded in unison. It helped to have someone to nod with. That’s how Lily and Juliet survived. A textbook answer, a bad joke, and a sister to lean on, and so far they’d managed to keep their dysfunctional little family from going completely down the drain.

“So what’s all this about a party?” Juliet asked.

Lily sat down next to her sister. “It’s the only one I’ve been invited to since junior prom. Which I missed because I got sick,” Lily said quietly. Juliet wanted to interrupt. Lily took her hand and kept going before her sister could argue. “Look, I know what’s happening to me. I know that soon I won’t be able to go to school anymore. I’m out of time, Jules. And it’s okay. Well, no, it isn’t okay, but I’ve accepted it at least. I just want to go to one high school party before I’m stuck inside a plastic bubble for the rest of my life.”

“So. Tristan’s taking you,” Juliet began cautiously.

“Yeah.” Lily looked down, smiling softly. “And I’m pretty sure we’re going as a couple.”

“But he doesn’t care if you don’t go to parties. You know that.”

“I also know how long I waited for this. How long I waited for him. I can’t miss this party, Jules.”

Juliet tilted her head to the side and rested it on Lily’s shoulder. They sat together for a while, comforted just to be close to each other.

“Want me to blow out your hair?” Juliet asked after a long silence. She sat up and looked Lily in the eye, smiling.

“Would you?” Lily jumped off the bed and pulled her sister up with her, as if the melancholy exchange they’d just had was miles away already. “I can never get the back.”

chapter 2

Three and a half hours later, Lily had luxurious, bouncy Hollywood-starlet hair. She even managed to get some all-natural, nonirritating makeup on her face and a slinky dress on her beanpole body without getting too overheated. The dress wasn’t fancy, but it did complement her slender build and tricky coloring. Lily didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard, but she still wanted to look good.

“You and Tristan are easing into the whole relationship thing, right? Taking it slow?” Juliet asked a little too casually.

“We have sex six times a day, and we’re thinking of making a porno together,” Lily said, poker-faced, while she rubbed almond oil on her bare legs. She glanced up to see Juliet glaring at her. “Yes! We’re taking it slow. Maybe a little too slow.”

“Good!” Juliet shoved Lily playfully. “I love Tristan, but he has a really bad track record with girls. He’s hurt a lot of people.”

Lily’s smile faded. Tristan was the best friend she could ever imagine. He’d been there for her through things that would have sent most people running for the hills. But he didn’t treat his girlfriends nearly as well. Lily had seen it firsthand with Miranda, and she wished she hadn’t.

“He’s different with me,” Lily said. She stood up and wiped the rest of the oil from her hands. “It’ll be different with me,” she repeated emphatically.

Juliet’s big eyes grew even bigger with concern. “Okay,” she said. “But maybe it’d be a good idea to change out of that dress. Make him wait for it.”

“Wait?” Lily said, grinning at her sister. “I’m the one who’s been waiting. Not him.”

“Exactly. And after this long, what’s your rush?” Juliet joked. They both heard Tristan pull into the driveway. “Last chance to run upstairs and change into jeans and a T-shirt?”

“Not going to happen, Jules,” Lily replied cheerfully as she went to let Tristan inside. She pulled the door open and smiled at him, her stomach filling with butterflies even though she saw him every day.

“What did you do to your hair?” Tristan immediately asked, a scowl forming on his face.

Lily’s hand darted up automatically to smooth her already smooth hair, her excitement disappearing. “Juliet did it for me.”

“Hey, Tristan,” Juliet called out.

“What’s up, Jules?” he called back in greeting.

“You don’t like it?” Lily asked him, feeling defensive. This wasn’t how she’d imagined this moment at all. After she’d spent hours sweating it out under a hairdryer, he was supposed to be staring at her slack-jawed.

“It’s okay.” Tristan shrugged in a noncommittal way, his eyes scanning her. “What are you wearing?”

“A dress.”

“Kinda little, isn’t it?” He grimaced. “I can see, like, all of you.”

“Oh, the horror,” Lily deadpanned. She pushed him outside and called back to her sister. “’Night, Jules.”

“Have fun,” Juliet said, her face apologetic. Lily gave her sister a pained look before she closed the door and followed Tristan to his car. He didn’t start the engine immediately. He turned to Lily, starting to say something, but Lily cut him off.

“The next thing you say had better be a compliment,” she said incredulously. “Tristan. I’m wearing
makeup.
This may never happen again.”

Tristan shut his mouth and started the car. He pulled out of the driveway and was halfway down the street before he spoke. “Cute shoes.”

“That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”

They drove the rest of the way to Scot’s in comfortable silence. Scot’s street was already lined with cars. He had the kind of parents who went out of town a lot and didn’t seem to mind that their son threw huge parties in their absence. They had to know about it—everyone in town knew about Scot’s parties—but since being the “party guy” made Scot incredibly popular, his parents turned a blind eye to the whole thing. All they asked for was plausible deniability in front of the other kids’ parents, and Scot was good about that. He always hid the valuables, covered the furniture, and cleaned up thoroughly before his parents got home.

“Vomit,” Tristan warned, yanking Lily out of way before she could step in a chunky, orange puddle in the grass.

“Good eye.”

“Lots of practice. Scot’s front yard is always touch and go.”

Lily slowed down and tried to take shallow breaths. A bunch of kids were smoking out front on the wraparound deck, and she could smell it halfway across the yard. Several of the smokers spotted Tristan and started calling out to him, peering through the gloom at the girl on his arm.

“Hey, man! You made it. Who’s that with you?” a kid everyone called Breakfast asked. Lily realized no one recognized her without the usual meringue of curly hair on top of her head.

“Hey, Breakfast. It’s me. Lily.”

“Lily?” Breakfast immediately put his cigarette behind his back—thoughtful, but like that would help. “Are you okay? I mean does this bother you?”

Her eyes were watering, but she smiled and waved at him. “Don’t worry about it.”

She didn’t want to make him feel bad. She liked Breakfast. He’d always been a bit on the goofy side, but he had a way of winning people over—even the bullies who wanted to harass him.

“Lily?” Tristan’s brow creased with worry, and he tugged on her arm, angling her away from the smoke.