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.
I plastered a smile on my face as Anita kneeled on the bed behind me, gathering my hair in her hands. “Should we do her hair up or down?” she asked the room at large.
“Oh, fake eyelashes!” Emily cried as she pawed through Sally’s makeup case. “I also brought those new coloured contacts I ordered. They’re sapphire blue. You’re going to look so hot you won’t even recognize yourself!”
I groaned inwardly as they crowded around me, holding up various garments like I was a mannequin.
“Are you wearing a thong?” a girl named Melissa asked me quietly in my ear.
It was going to be a long night.
The Limo was a club on the edge of town that I’d never been to before. It had three floors, four DJs, and apparently no parking. We’d been circling, trying to find a space, for ten minutes. It was a little too far from campus to attract the university crowd, which, Sally informed me, was the whole point.
“I want to meet older guys,” she said as she flawlessly applied another layer of Hot Mama red lipstick without a mirror. It was kind of impressive. “Guys our age have no money. I want a sugar daddy!”
“I thought Alex was your sugar daddy,” Emily said as she jerked the wheel to the right, finally slipping into what appeared to be the last available spot on the block.
“Alex lives off his trust fund,” Sally said with distaste. “I want a guy with his own cash, preferably lots of it, which he’ll have no problem showering all over me. Maybe even while I’m naked, ‘cause that’s super hot.”
“Way to dream big, Sally,” Anita said.
I liked Anita. Not only was she wearing normal clothes instead of the overly revealing apparel her friends favoured, but she seemed to find Sally as ridiculous as I did. I even forgave her for wearing a tiara on her head tonight. It was her birthday, after all.
“Is Alex aware of this rich man desire of yours?” I inquired as we all piled out of the car.
“What would I tell him for?” Sally said with a puzzled look on her face.
We took off our coats and left them on the backseat to avoid paying for coat check. I linked arms with Emily as we crossed the street and joined the line outside the club, shivering in our seasonally inappropriate outfits. Barely a minute had passed before Sally was nuzzling up to the beefed-up guy standing in front of us in line, shamelessly whining that her boobs were cold and would he mind warming them up for her? He looked happy to oblige.
I took a step out of line to check how far we were from the front. The line was moving pretty quickly. We probably only had about five more minutes to wait.
“Who are you looking for, Katie?” Emily said as I came back to her side. I just saw the tip of a flask as she shoved it back into her blue sparkly clutch. That explained why they were all so giggly already. I hoped nobody would throw up before we made it inside. “Oh, I know who you’re looking for. You’re on the lookout for Lucas, your secret beau!”
“Emily!” I cried, giving her a look of death as her friends all gushed at once: “Oh, Lucas!” They drew out his name until it had about five syllables, all high-pitched and mortifying.
Clearly they already knew about Lucas and me, though there wasn’t much to tell. I didn’t even want to think about how completely Em must have exaggerated the little I’d told her about my encounters with him. She probably had the two of us doing it like bunnies in his room. There were probably already rumours of our sex tape circulating campus.
“Shut up, you guys,” I said, trying to get control of the tipsy, giggling horde. “Lucas and I are just friends. Don’t you dare go telling anybody anything different.”
“Wait, didn’t he buy you a kitten?” Melissa said.
“And hand it to you half-naked?” Anita said.
“And covered in chocolate?” Em chimed in.
I groaned in the back of my throat as they veered off into a discussion of Lucas’s abs, the abs of the whole basketball team, and how many jocks Sally had slept with last semester—they were in disagreement whether it was eleven or twelve. I gratefully tuned out.
The subject of Lucas had left me feeling guilty and out of sorts. During my three-day hibernation, he’d texted me a few times. Once to ask why I’d skipped class, and another time during class to inform me that Naomi had taken the easel next to him and that he wished it was me instead. Because she smelled like cheese. I’d wanted to text him back to say she always smelled like cheese, but I didn’t think it was a good enough reply. Texting was all about being clever and hilarious. It was a lot of pressure, especially when your brain was turning to mush from watching six hours straight of daytime TV. Then, just a few hours ago, he’d sent me this text:
Lucas: Hey, disappearing act. Where’d you go?
I hadn’t replied to that one, either.
A really stupid part of me had started examining my life in the context of the creepy Facebook message late last night. Other than March twentieth, the only new thing in my life was Lucas. And—here was the really dumb part—I sort of felt like I was being punished for letting him into my life. Yeah, it was pretty crooked logic, but that’s how it felt. I’d broken my rules. I’d let him get to know me, even if only a little. I had a cat under my bed. I’d lost the tight control I usually kept on my life, and look at what had happened.
Brandon had never contacted me before, not once, not in six years.
I felt like I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
And as gorgeous as the cookie jar was, I was furious with myself. What had I been thinking? That I could break my rules with no consequences? That six years ago had never happened? That I could be just like everybody else? That was a laugh.
Just before I’d fallen asleep I’d made myself a promise. No more Lucas.
If for no other reason than because I was pretty sure he would probably break my heart and I was already broken in so many other ways. I needed to keep my heart intact.
Lucas was bad news. He was out of my league. He was one hundred percent trouble.
We finally made it to the front of the line and I followed Emily into the pounding beat of the club. The girls made a beeline for the standing tables clustered in front of the bar at the back of the first floor, and Em and I took drink orders. As we pushed our way through the crowd to the bar, I was about to comment to Em that Sally would be disappointed—I didn’t see a single guy anywhere, only girls—when she grabbed my arm so tightly I jumped.
“Katie, look who it is!” she said gleefully into my ear. “Why don’t I let you order the drinks?”
I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of who she was pointing at—why was I always stuck behind people who were so much taller than me? Through the crowd I spotted broad shoulders under a black t-shirt, dark hair, those honey-coloured eyes focused downward on the drink he was mixing, and, as he handed the drink over the bar, those dangerous dimples.
Our bartender was none other than bad-news-out-of-my-league-one-hundred-percent-trouble Lucas.