WHEN TUESDAY EVENING rolled around, I let Prairie down.
I waited until she got home to tell her. I told myself it was because she never took her phone into the lab where they conducted the experiments-she was part of a team doing some kind of research with high magnetic fields, and they couldn’t take anything electronic into the lab with them-but the truth was that I could have left a message on her work phone, or her cell phone. I knew she checked both the minute she got out of the lab-after she checked the other phone, the one hidden in a pocket in the bottom of her purse.
I didn’t call any of those numbers, though. At five, when Prairie came home all excited about our evening out, I was waiting for her, sitting on one of the barstools in the kitchen.
Her smile slipped a little when she saw what I was wearing. I knew the blue halter top showed too much, and the white shorts were too short-and the platform sandals were way over the top. But Charlotte had called after lunch, and once she’d talked me into her plan, she coached me about what to wear-“You’ll look so hot, Amber”-and if I showed up in something else, it would be proof that I didn’t fit in.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m going out with Charlotte and Jess,” I mumbled, not meeting Prairie’s eyes.
“Oh, are they… We’re not going for sushi?”
I shook my head and reached for my purse. In my sandals I was taller than Prairie. “Change of plans. We’re going to catch a movie and then maybe go out for a late dinner, just me and them.”
There was a pause, and I edged toward the door, feeling my face go hot.
“Okay. Just… call me if you’re going to be late,” Prairie said in a small voice, and hearing her try to stay cheerful was worse than her getting angry and yelling at me.
Maybe that was why I snapped at her. “I always call. Remember? I’m going to have to grow up eventually, Prairie. Or do you plan on keeping me in this-this cage for the rest of my life?”
Then I ran for the door and let it slam behind me, trying to drown out the shocked silence. But I couldn’t put the image of Prairie out of my mind: she stood there in her neat tailored clothes with her hand to her throat, looking pretty and elegant and more worried than I’d ever seen her.
I might have said no to Charlotte, except that Gojo was bringing his summer interns. And they were nineteen and twenty, business students at the university, which made it seem almost okay. Well, at least a lot more okay than when it was just us and a twenty-eight-year-old guy.
We met at Charlotte’s town house, on the other side of the development. She’d snuck a bottle of vodka into her room. She mixed it with raspberry Crystal Light in big plastic glasses. While we did each other’s makeup, I drank some, instead of just pretending, like I usually did. It seemed to me that Charlotte was watching me more carefully than usual, like she was coming to a conclusion about me that would determine whether I would still be a part of the in crowd when summer ended.
Jess had told me that Charlotte was a big deal at Grosbeck. I didn’t doubt it, and I also thought I knew why Charlotte had chosen Jess as her best friend: Jess was rich and pretty but she was neither smart nor opinionated. She did as she was told, and she seemed more than happy to let Charlotte make all the decisions.
Like now: Charlotte told her to try the green eyeliner under her lower lashes, and Jess just sat there like one of those makeup Barbie heads I’d always wanted when I was a little girl, letting Charlotte draw it on. When Charlotte turned to me, I snapped shut the compact I was holding before she could start in on me, and announced that I was ready. I could see that Charlotte had something on the tip of her tongue, but with my short platinum hair and the clothes I was wearing, too much eye makeup would make me look like a slut, which was not how I wanted to look in front of a bunch of strangers.
In fact, I almost went home after we said goodbye to Charlotte’s folks. I thought we were going to try to sneak out, but Charlotte took us straight past her mom and stepdad, who were watching TV in the family room. Charlotte’s mom jumped up, spilling her wine, and told us to have fun at the movie. She gave Charlotte a noisy peck on the cheek and then squinted at me and Jess, swaying slightly on her spike heels.
“Don’t you girls look sweet?” she said, breathing wine in my face and giving me a view of her ample cleavage, which her tight pink top didn’t cover very well.
At least I knew where Charlotte got her sense of style.
By the time we’d walked to Gojo’s apartment, my sandals were hurting my feet. Outside his door, Charlotte gave us a quick once-over, tugging at Jess’s top, then fluffing the front of my hair so it swooped over one eye, which made it hard to see. I pushed it back behind my ear. “Whatever,” Charlotte sighed as Gojo opened the door, wearing a sunburn and a loud print shirt.
His interns, Justin and Calvin, didn’t seem all that impressive to me. Justin was thin, with a red line of acne along his hairline, and Calvin had on a work shirt buttoned too high and jeans that looked like he’d ironed them. They didn’t match my image of the kind of guys Charlotte and Jess would hang out with, but maybe it was enough that they were older and eager to party with us. They’d already been drinking, it was clear. I decided to stick to water for the rest of the night, since I was already feeling the vodka. Until I met Charlotte, I’d had alcohol only once, back when I lived with Gram. I tasted one of her beers when I was ten and trying to figure out why she liked it so much.
By nine-thirty we still hadn’t had dinner-Gojo had promised to get takeout but had somehow never gotten around to it-and the party had splintered into couples. Gojo turned the lights down low before he and Charlotte went out on the balcony, leaving the door open, so we could hear them murmuring and laughing. Justin pulled Jess down on his lap on the couch and she pretended to resist, but it was pretty clear where they were headed, especially since she was probably the drunkest person there. She’d been pounding rum-and-Cokes since we’d arrived.
Calvin seemed just about as thrilled to be stuck with me as I was to be with him. I’d been making small talk, asking him about school, what he was studying-he wanted to go back to his hometown and open a mobile computer-repair franchise-and he’d been pushing his beer bottle in circles on the table, not looking at me.
“I’m, uh, only sixteen,” I blurted after an awkward lull in the conversation. That made his eyes go wide and I knew my suspicion was correct: Gojo had told them we were older.
“I’m only here because Johnson made it sound like it would come up in my performance review if I didn’t show up,” Calvin admitted. “He’s always making us go to happy hour.”
“You don’t want to?” I asked, surprised. “I mean…”
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” Calvin said, blushing. “A pretty serious one.”
After that, I didn’t feel so bad about leaving. It helped to know that there was someone else who felt out of place, who didn’t want to be there. Calvin said he’d walk me home, and I said he didn’t have to, and he said he’d feel better about it, that you never knew after dark, and I had to suppress a smile, wondering what he’d think if he knew exactly how much trouble I’d actually gotten into in the last year.
“I’m going to head home,” I said loudly, gathering up my things.
No response from the patio, which had been quiet for a while. But Jess staggered to her feet, almost tripping over Justin.
“No, don’t go, Amber,” she said, her words slurring. “It won’t be-it won’t be-”
I saw it coming, saw her teetering in slow motion, trying to get her balance, before she took a faltering step in her clunky flip-flops, twisted her ankle and went down.
She crashed onto the coffee table, and from the sounds of things breaking, I was sure that the glass top had shattered, but when I raced across the room, I saw that the noise had been made by the glasses and bottles that had accumulated there over the course of the night. Most had fallen to the carpeted floor, spilling their contents, but Jess had broken a couple of glasses, and as I helped her up from the mess, I saw blood dripping down her arm.
“Amber,” she said, her lips bunched in a confused pout. “I think I cut myself.”
That was when I noticed a two-inch piece of glass embedded in her wrist. And the blood wasn’t just flowing from the wound-it was pumping out in rhythmic spurts.
“Holy shit,” Justin said, backing away from the mess on the floor.
“That looks bad,” Calvin said. “Why don’t you take her into the bathroom, Amber, and we can clean up out here. Give me a sec, I’ll be right there.”
Jess leaned against me, staring at her arm in detached amazement. The bottom of her shirt was already soaked in blood. I heard Calvin and Gojo arguing on the patio, but I closed the bathroom door behind us.
In the light, it looked even worse. I helped Jess sit down on the edge of the tub, but she slid onto the tiled floor, leaning into the corner where the tub met the wall, her eyelids drifting down. I knew she was drunk, but was she already weak from losing so much blood? It looked like at least a cup had leaked from her wrist, and I suspected that if I pulled the shard out, the blood would flow even faster.
I felt my knees buckle, and my vision clouded. The murmur of the ancient voices swirled and crescendoed in my mind, blocking out everything else. My fingers twitched and my heartbeat slowed to a steady, echoing rhythm.
Calvin pushed open the bathroom door. “Jesus-you okay, Amber? You’re not going to, like, faint or something, are you?”
“No, I…,” I managed to choke out, my throat dry, my hands shaking from the effort of trying not to touch Jess.
I couldn’t do it. Not here. I couldn’t let them know, couldn’t let them see. I’d worked so hard to fit in since we’d come to Milwaukee. I was starting school in two short months, and I just wanted to be a normal girl in a normal high school with normal friends and normal habits.
And the thing I longed to do was not normal at all.