All the Rage

We leave the office an awkward fivesome, just before the bell goes. Our parents duck out as soon as it rings, opting to wait in their cars while Tina and I get our homework for the week. She’s immediately flanked by girls who want to know the whole story. I catch Tina’s beginning—She’s a fucking psycho, they won’t do anything—but I don’t hang around for the end.

Teachers are cold to me when they hand me my assignments and I wonder if it’s an honest reaction or one Diaz told them to have. When I reach Ms. Alcott’s room for my English homework, Brock is at her desk. She hands him a pile of papers.

“Give Alek my best. Tell him I hope we see him back here soon.”

“Yeah, I will…” Brock tenses when he sees me. “Thanks, Ms. A.”

He leaves with her smiling sadly after him and the smile disappears when she turns her attention to me. “I have your homework right here…”

“What’s wrong with Alek?” I ask.

She looks at me like I’m an idiot and in this moment, I get the feeling she truly doesn’t like me.

“You can’t imagine the kind of stress Alek is under right now, but I hope it gives you something to think about, Romy. There are people with actual, real troubles out there and—” She grabs a stack of worksheets, and hands them over. “There are people who make trouble for themselves.”

Brock is waiting when I come out. I barely have time to register him before he’s too close. Too, too close.

“You’re telling people I slipped GHB into your drink at Wake Lake?” he asks, and he sounds almost amused, like he’s been so bogged down by the weight of all this Penny stuff, he’s okay with this funny little distraction. “Really?”

“Did you?”

“Why are you asking, if that’s what you’re telling people?”

As much as I want to run, I also want to corner him, want to turn this into a confrontation and scare a confession out of him somehow, but it would never happen, not with Brock. The safest thing my body can do is keep moving.

“I know you had it,” I say. “I heard Sarah and Norah talking about it in the girls’ room—”

“But can you prove that I gave you any?” Anger swells inside me, the kind that made me want to tear Tina apart. “I mean, are you telling me you remember a specific moment where I slipped GHB into your drink? Because if you can’t, Grey, you better shut your fucking mouth.”

“Did you?” I ask again because the only thing I can do is ask. People are looking at us, me and Brock, walking down the hall together. It’s not right. None of it. He must sense it too. He breaks away, innocently holding up his hands.

“Did I?” he asks back.

When I get in the car with my loaded-down book bag, I’m shaking. I want to bite my fist. I try to keep it all off my face as Mom says, “You’re going to call Tracey tonight and you’re going to tell her you’re not going to be at work until next week—”

“What?” I blink. “I can’t—”

“I don’t think suspension from that place,” Mom says, nodding at the building, “is going to drive home the point that what you did, Romy, was wrong. You don’t get to stay home all day and then go to work and see Leon. What about that is a punishment?”

Hearing his name is a painful reminder of what I still have to fix. I don’t know how I’m going to do that because when I play the search over in my head, I don’t know what I could have done differently.

“What am I going to tell Tracey when she asks why I can’t come in for a week?”

“You’ll have to figure it out.”

“And if I lose my job?”

Mom sighs. “If I really thought you’d lose your job, do you think I’d make you do it? Last night, I told Tracey you got into some trouble at school, that you got hurt. She’s waiting for your call.”

“You tell her I started it?”

“Obviously not.”

At home, I call Tracey from my bedroom and tell her I need time off and she makes her voice nice for me, loses that managerial edge that keeps everyone in line. Holly will cover my shifts. It’s fine. It’s totally fine. It takes me the afternoon to knock out my homework, penciling answers I have no confidence of being right but I’m confident I don’t care if they’re wrong. When Mom goes to her cleaning job, Todd puts dinner in my hands. He sits at the table, flipping through an old paperback while I chop up potatoes and onions and cut the skin off some chicken legs. It’s sort of peaceful.

“You start a fight with Tina Ortiz because you’re upset about something else?” he asks casually, turning a page.

Was sort of peaceful.

“What?”

He tilts his head back to look at me. “You heard me.”

“Did I start a fight with a girl because I’m upset about something else?” I repeat and he nods. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

He cracks the spine of the book and sets it on the table. “You’re telling me you never been mad or upset over one thing and took it out on another person?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.” He pauses. “You know, you can tell us what’s going on. There’s no one you have to keep it a secret from.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say again. He sighs heavily. I wait until the oven beeps and then I put the chicken in and time it.

“Take that out when it’s ready,” I tell him. “I’m not hungry.”

*

i wake up on my bed on top of the covers.

I feel like it should be morning, a new day, and I guess it is. When I check the time it’s three a.m. I don’t remember setting out to sleep, but it must have pulled me under.

I stare out the window. The street is so quiet. Lights off in every house I can see from here, all the people inside with their eyes shut. It’s an hour before the first signs of life—a car headed down a road that’s not this one—reach my ears. It’s a few minutes more before there’s another: a thin whine floating in through my open window, familiar but out of place this late. The screen door. I peer into the darkness, trying to figure out whether it’s someone coming or going and then I hear a soft cough.