When Ethan leaves, Mom bustles back into the room with Edna. She holds it up, and I slip the vest around my shoulders. For once I’m actually happy to get an intensive therapy session. Who knows what trials I’ll face tonight? It doesn’t hurt to go in extra prepared.
When my treatment is over, Mom puts Edna away, then climbs into my bed and strokes my hair, singing me the same lullaby she has every time I’ve been sick, ever since I was old enough to remember. On the surface it’s a sweet song, but when you really listen to the lyrics, it’s about a mother who loses her son and longs for him. It’s depressing, and I’ve always hated it—hated how close to home it feels—but I don’t say so. It feels so good to have her near, babying me, that my eyes flutter closed, and I think, just for a second, wouldn’t it be easier if I went to sleep?
Mom slips out of the bed. Her footsteps make the wood under the floorboards creak. When she shuts the door, I pop my eyes open.
It’s time to end this game.
I’ve snuck out of the house so many times now that I have the whole thing down to a science. I’m at the front door, slipping on my shoes in the dark, in under a minute.
I should have been more careful.
“Where are you going?”
A shot of panic ripples through me. When I spin around, Jenny is leaning against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. A sliver of moonlight from the kitchen window fractures onto her pajamas.
“You know where,” I whisper.
“Don’t go.” She’s crying now. She smothers the sound with her palm.
Anger bubbles in my chest. How dare they involve my little sister.
“I don’t have a choice, Jenny, but this is the last time. I’m going to end it tonight.”
“I’m worried about you,” she protests. “I haven’t heard from the Society all day. Since you came to my school. They know. They know, Hope.”
I take a bracing breath. I have to be brave for my little sister. “I’m going to fix this, okay, Jenny?”
She sniffles, swallows audibly. “Just be careful,” she whispers. “Please.”
I nod and slip outside.
Lyla’s waiting for me in the car, gripping the steering wheel with both hands as she peers out at the lot.
“Hey,” I say, settling into the passenger seat. “Sorry I’m late.”
“No worries.” She shifts into drive.
We’re actually doing this.
One time when I was in the hospital for a gastro infection, I met a boy a few years younger than me who’d had surgery as a baby for a hole in his diaphragm. Because of the hole, he’d been born with his insides in the wrong place, pushed up into his lung space so there wasn’t enough room for him to breathe properly. And that’s how I feel now. As if everything inside me is twisted and tangled and there’s so much pressure on my chest that I can’t get in more than shallow gasps of air.
So much is at stake now. Not just for me. I feel for my inhaler in my purse as we bump out of the parking lot. Still there. Of course it’s still there. I blow out a breath to calm my nerves.
I look at the city whirring by outside the window. Even three blocks out from the Quarter, the streets are teeming with pedestrians zigzagging around cars with lime-green hand grenades and Solo cups in hand. Music and cheers seep through the windows.
Lyla brakes hard when a couple of girls with Mardi Gras beads looped around their necks stumble onto the road. A guy in a sweaty polo shirt runs past, drumming his hands on the hood of the car. We edge forward in the start-stop traffic.
“Shit, we’re going to be late,” I say, peering out the window. Will they wait for us? Will they think I bailed and leave?
“It’ll be fine,” Lyla says. “We still have ten minutes.”
Ethan will worry. He’ll think something happened.
I pull out my phone and tap a message.
“Who are you talking to?” Lyla asks.
“Just Ethan. Letting him know we might be a minute late.”
Eventually we get past the craziness of the Quarter. The roads thin out, and we hit the interstate. I should feel better, but instead a worm of tension winds around my spine. We’re so close now. The plan felt sound from the comfort of that diner booth, but now that I actually have to do it, confront Nikki, I realize how unprepared we really are. I don’t even know what I’m going to say. Do I come straight out with it? Trap her into admitting the truth? And how will she react? What if she tries to attack?
I have to sit on my hands so they don’t shake in my lap.
Lyla blasts past the exit that leads to the docks and Schilling Street.
I sit up and look behind me. “You just passed the exit.”
“I know,” Lyla says. “Just making a quick pit stop first.”
“But we’ll be late.”
“We have lots of time.”
“It’s eleven fifty-eight.”
“It’s fine. Relax.”
She pulls off the interstate onto a narrow, winding road. The car bumps over pitted gravel. Soon we pass under a vine-covered wrought-iron gate that says GREENLAWN CEMETERY in thick Gothic script.
“It’s a potter’s field,” Lyla explains. “One of the only cemeteries with belowground tombs in New Orleans. Pretty cool, huh?”