I left Mary in the car, because if I had to hear her sing one more verse of “The Name Game” song I was going to light Fadil’s car on fire with her in it. The only reason I’d bought her was because the voices rarely spoke to me unless they had something to tell me or a job they wanted me to do, and since she hadn’t told me what it was yet, I needed to keep her around until she did.
Pie Hole was—surprise!—a pie shop. They had, at any given time, over thirty types of pies baked fresh daily. Now, as I understand it, there is an uninformed faction of the population that thinks cake is superior to pie, but they are clearly wrong. There is no cake, only pie. Seeing as we limited our Pie Hole trips to three times a year, I had to take advantage of it, so I ordered slices of blueberry crumble, lemon meringue, and sweet potato pie. And, yes, I was going to eat every bite before going home, because leftovers wouldn’t last five seconds in the fridge.
Fadil and I sat on the trunk of his car eating pie. I stabbed a bite of his chocolate cream—and was lucky he didn’t stab me back—and leaned my head on his shoulder.
“Did I tell you I tried to kiss Naomi?” he asked.
I shook my head. “How do you try to kiss someone?”
“You lean across the armrest in the middle of the movie, all smooth and debonair, and when your lips are almost touching, you accidentally crush the soda you’re holding and spill it in your lap.”
I laughed for a solid minute while Fadil grimaced, reliving his shame. “Good thing you didn’t spill it on her.”
“Next time.”
“At least you know there’ll be a next time.”
“True.”
“So you’re really into her?”
Fadil nodded. “She’s curious about everything. It’s like you can’t just tell her something. You have to explain it and prove it and offer supporting evidence.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“Not really.”
“Well, she’s a lucky girl,” I said. “You’re kind of a catch.”
Fadil finished off his chocolate cream pie and started in on his peach cobbler. He ate his in order, finishing one before moving on to the next, while I put in a valiant effort to eat them all at the same time. “How come you never tried to catch me?”
“Apparently I only date guys who disgust me and like girls who disgust them,” I said with my mouth full of pie.
“I’m serious. I’m not saying I wanted you to, though, so don’t get your hopes up.”
“You’re just . . . Fadil. I didn’t ever have those kinds of feelings for you.”
“Fair enough. And, for the record, I only had those feelings for you for a minute in eighth grade.”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Really?”
“It was the Halloween dance. You showed up wearing that Valkyrie costume and I thought you were the baddest warrior I’d ever seen.”
“How come you didn’t say something?”
“The moment passed,” he said. “Plus, I tried picturing us kissing and it made me laugh.”
“Which would have been a total mood killer if it’d actually happened.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
We fell quiet for a moment. It was weird to think that Fadil had ever had those feelings for me. There had been times when I’d wished I could have fallen in love with Fadil. He was sort of the perfect human being. Good-looking, sweet, smart, generous. He was the kind of guy girls should have been beating each other down to date. But love is a feeling you can’t fake and you can’t force.
“I feel like I’m falling, Fadil,” I said. “Faster and faster, and I’m fairly certain I don’t have a parachute.”
“Are we talking about Freddie or the voices?”
“Yes.”
Uh, Elena? It’s kind of hot in this car. Wanna maybe get me out of here before I suffocate? Oh, that’s right, I can’t suffocate because I’m a statue. Get me out or I’ll keep singing.
Fadil set his pie aside and angled his body toward me. “You’ve got a lot to figure out, Elena, but you’re making it more difficult for yourself. It’s not that complicated.”
“That’s easy for you to say; you’re not the one a Virgin Mary statue is serenading with ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen.’ ”
“Let’s ignore that you actually know any song from The Sound of Music for a second. You’re right; this is happening to you and not me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’d do in your place. I wouldn’t waste my time trying to understand David Combs, for one.”
“Why?” I asked. “Because you think Allah explains everything?”
“No, but thanks for shitting on my religion.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were,” Fadil said. “But let’s move on. No, the reason I wouldn’t waste my time with David Combs is because I don’t give a crap why some entitled, middle-class white boy tried to commit murder.”
“And I’m the dismissive one?”
“We’re living in a world where a bunch of rednecks can literally take over a federal building armed with guns and wind up not getting any jail time, but a kid with brown skin can’t walk around in public without worrying about getting shot by some overzealous neighborhood watch asshole. So no, I don’t care if the voices or Allah or your stupid stuffed Cthulhu doll told him to shoot Freddie. It doesn’t change what he did.”
“I know that,” I said.
“Do you?” Fadil seemed to have lost interest in his pie, which was sacrilege. “If he’d left a note saying he shot Freddie because he was bullied, half of Arcadia would be holding anti-bullying rallies. If he’d done it because some girl he’d liked wouldn’t go out with him, we’d be talking about how boys need to learn to deal with rejection. If the voices told him to do it, then we’d have to ask ourselves if he even had a choice in the matter. I’m tired of watching the world bend over backward to make excuses for boys like him.”
I scraped the remains of my three pies into one container and closed it, thinking I could hide it in the fridge at home long enough for Mama to finish it.
“I’m not trying to absolve David Combs,” I said. “I’m trying to absolve myself.”
“What have you got to be sorry for?”
“I want to know why David shot Freddie, because I need to know it wasn’t my fault. I want to figure out where the people who are ‘raptured’ are going, because I need to know Ava Sutter is somewhere better than this.” Tears began to well in my eyes and I blinked them back. “Her parents have no idea where she is or what happened to her. They’re wrecked, and it’s my fault.”
Fadil growled. “It’s not your fault. It’s the voices’ fault. You didn’t take anyone. They did.”
“Only they can’t take anyone unless I heal someone, but you’re acting like this is an easy choice, and it’s not! I’ve got you in one ear telling me to trust the voices, Freddie in the other telling me the voices are using me, Deputy Akers showing up at my house in the middle of the night telling me Homeland Security might be investigating me, and the Virgin Mary in the front seat of your car singing Spice Girls songs.” I turned and shouted at the back window. “I don’t give a fuck what you really, really want!”
I wasn’t sure what Fadil was going to do when he slid off the trunk of the car, opened his door, and leaned inside. Honestly, part of me was scared he was going to abandon me. My problems had become too tangled around him and he was going to sever the threads and leave me behind. Instead, he returned to the trunk where I was sitting, holding the Virgin Mary statue.
“This is a statue, Elena,” he said.
“A talking statue. Though currently it’s trying to rap.”
“Whatever.” Fadil held the statue up to me. “It can yell at you, sing at you, and annoy you. But that’s it.”
Remind him that David Combs could have shot him instead of Winifred.
I pursed my lips and breathed in deeply. “She wants me to tell you that David could have shot you instead of Freddie.”
F
adil nodded. “Maybe, but the voices wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.”
Says him.
“What do you mean?”
“If Combs had shot me, it would have been his choice. He shot Freddie of his own free will. It doesn’t matter why.”
“But—”
Fadil held up his hand. “No buts, Elena. Even if a statue told Combs to shoot Freddie, it couldn’t have forced him to steal his parents’ gun, carry it to Starbucks, and pull the trigger. Just like the voices can tell you who to heal and when, but they can’t make you do it.”
That’s not a theory you want to test, Elena-bo-belena.
“They can rapture people.”
“Only if you heal someone first,” he said. “I told you the choice was easy because the voices don’t matter, David Combs doesn’t matter, Freddie doesn’t matter, and I don’t matter. The only person who can choose is you.”
He’s a damn dirty liar.
“She says you’re a liar.”
“Really?” Fadil glared at the statue, cocked his arm back, and threw the Virgin Mary across the parking lot. She sailed in a high, graceful arc, yelling, Elena, noooooo! before smashing into the asphalt and shattering into hundreds of shards. “How do your voices like me now?”
I climbed down off the trunk and wrapped my arms around Fadil. “Thank you,” I whispered into his ear.
When I let go, he said, “You still have no idea what you’re going to do, do you?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, it was worth a try, and at least we both got pie out of it.”
THIRTY-FIVE
THERE’S NOTHING GOOD on TV after midnight on Wednesdays when you only have basic cable and can’t afford Netflix. How do I know this? Because it was Wednesday night and I couldn’t sleep and there wasn’t a damn thing to watch that wasn’t an infomercial or some dumb show where sexy characters, who are supposed to be my age but are really in their twenties, make terrible life choices. Or buddy cop shows. There’s always a show about a cop and someone weird. A cop and a writer. A cop and an interpretive dance instructor. A cop and an alien from the future. No, I got it. A cop and a disgruntled librarian team up to track down the worst late-book offenders. And with one idea, my career as a writer for television ended before it had even begun.
Anyway, Mama was at work, Sofie and Conor were in bed, and I was curled up on the couch under a blanket when Sean stumbled through the door reeking of cigarette smoke and defeat.
“What’re you still doing up?” he said, his words crammed together like rush-hour traffic.
“Can’t sleep.”
“Oh.” Sean wandered into the kitchen. I expected him to take some aspirin and then pass out, but he grabbed something from the fridge, which turned out to be a beer, and then flopped down on the couch beside me.
“You smell worse up close,” I said.
Sean shrugged. “Seriously. Why’re you awake? Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
“I do,” I said. “But I have a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?” Sean’s eyelids fell heavy over his bloodshot hazel eyes, but there was a sincerity in his voice that made me think he actually cared, though it might have been the alcohol talking.
I pulled the blanket tighter around me. “I have to make a choice, but it feels impossible. No matter what I do, it’s going to so suck for someone.”
Sean sipped at his beer and tried to swallow a burp, but it came up despite his attempt. “College or my dad,” he said.
“What about them?”
“My dad got sick and I had to decide whether to go to college or whether to get a job to help my mom and stay home to spend time with him in case he died.”
“How’d you decide?”
“Let me tell you the thing about shitty choices. They make you feel like you’re deciding the rest of your life in a single moment. If I went to college, my mom could’ve lost everything, my dad could’ve died, and I wouldn’t have gotten to make peace with him. Without college, I worried I’d never make much of myself.”
Sean’s father had died before he’d married my mother. “How do you make that kind of choice when it can affect everything?”
“Everything doesn’t matter,” Sean said. “All I was deciding was one thing. Do I stay with my dad or do I go to college?”
“But your decision had consequences.”
“Fuck the consequences.”
“That may work for you,” I said, “but we can’t all ignore the effects of our actions.”
Sean rolled his eyes, but I didn’t know whether he was sleepy or annoyed. “Shit, Elena, I’m not stupid. Sometimes, though, you gotta focus on your actions in the here and now and forget the future.”
“But—”
“Look, some guy has a heart attack on the sidewalk. You do CPR and try to save him, right?”
“Of course.”
“But what if you knew he was going to kill a hundred folks in ten years? Would you still save him?”
“I don’t know.”
Sean waved me off. “Yes you do. You’d do CPR on him because you can’t possibly foresee what’s going to happen ten or twenty years from now. Shit, you can’t see what’s going to happen a week from now. The only information you got to make your decision is what’s in front of your face.” He drained the last of his beer and let out a belch, not bothering to hold it in this time. “That’s what I did with my dad. He was sick, my mom needed me, so I stayed.”
My phone rang and I picked it up. Freddie’s name flashed on the screen. Sean nodded at me and stumbled into his bedroom.
I answered the phone.
“Elena?”
“What?” I hadn’t forgotten the last time we’d spoken, and I wasn’t about to act like everything was normal even though my stomach was squirming and I was starting to sweat. “Are you hiding in another closet?”
“Can you meet me somewhere?”
“It’s almost one in the morning,” I said. “On a school night.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Why should I?”
Freddie didn’t immediately answer and I wondered if she’d hung up, but the phone said she was still connected. “Look, I’m sorry for what I said to you earlier. And this is important.”
The only thing I thought she could have said that would have made me agree to meet her was that she’d harbored a deep and abiding love for me since the moment she first saw me and that she hadn’t been able to admit it sooner because the tidal wave of her emotions was simply too great and would have dragged her out to sea and drowned her.
She did not say that thing. She said another thing. I hadn’t fantasized about her saying it, but it was equally compelling.
“I have information about David Combs.”
THIRTY-SIX
THE TEST ADMINISTRATOR at the department of motor vehicles who’d passed Freddie and allowed her to menace the streets of Arcadia should have been shamed and fired. Freddie didn’t seem aware that her blue Prius had a turn signal. In fact, she didn’t seem aware that she was sharing the road with other drivers at all. Luckily for them, and me, there were few other cars out at one a.m. on a Wednesday night.
I’d quickly changed out of my pajamas and met Freddie in front of my apartment. She took me to a twenty-four-hour diner, and that’s how I found myself staring across a coffee-stained table at her when I should have been asleep. I got the impression that she didn’t want to be the first to speak and that we could have stared at each other until the sun rose and it wouldn’t have bothered her in the slightest. It did, however, bother the hell out of me.
“You said you had information about David Combs.” Okay, yeah, it came out like I was interrogating her, but all I’d done was agree to meet her to discuss Combs; I hadn’t agreed to be nice.
“Have you learned anything new?”
“What the hell?” I said. “You were the one who told me I had to meet you, so start talking or I’ll walk home.”
&nb
sp; Freddie’s lips pulled back in disgust. “What the fuck is your problem?”
“My problem?” I said. “You’re lucky I’m even sitting here after what you said to me yesterday.”
“What about what you said?”
“You started it.”
“I’m not the one who said you should have let me die.”
“Only because you said everyone hated me, and then kept calling me Mary.”
Freddie raised one eyebrow. “I was trying to get a rise out of you. Mary.”
I clenched my fists and dug my nails into my palms. “Oh my God! I hate you so much right now.”
An impish smile crept onto her face. “Then you don’t still have a crush on me?”
“I don’t get you,” I said. “One minute you act like I’m your nemesis and the next you’re flirting? Is this a joke to you?”
“Look, I’m sorry for the things I said. I was having a day. And then you told me you only saved me because you had a thing for me and I kind of lost my shit a little.”
“A little?”
“Okay, a lot.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then I guess I didn’t mean it when I said I wished I hadn’t healed you.”
“You guess?”
“It’s fifty-fifty at the moment.”
Freddie winked and nudged me under the table with her foot. “You wouldn’t have let me die.”
“Now it’s sixty-forty.”
“I knew you still liked me,” Freddie said.
“Sixty-forty against healing you,” I said. “Now tell me what was so important you had to drag me out of my house in the middle of the night.”
Our waitress wandered up, looking bothered and exhausted, and waited for us to order even though we didn’t have menus. Freddie asked for coffee and I did the same.
As soon as the waitress left, Freddie said, “Did you tell me you liked me because you think I’m into girls?”
“Obviously,” I said. “You went out with Ellen Cho for a few weeks last year. And don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not changing the subject, and I most certainly did not. I can’t stand Ellen Cho. For one, she turns every word into a verb—”