I lifted my foot, examining a minuscule drop of red on my beige espadrille.
"Oh," I said. "That's just some of Karen Sue Hankey's blood."
"Her blood?" Ruth looked flabbergasted. "Oh, my God. What did you do to her?"
"Punched her in the face," I said, still feeling a little smug at the memory. "You should have seen it, Ruth. It was beautiful."
"Beautiful?" Ruth banged her head against the steering wheel a few times. "Oh, God. And you were doing so well."
I couldn't understand her dismay.
"Ruth," I said. "She fully deserved it."
"That's no excuse," Ruth said, raising her head. "There's only one justification for hitting someone, Jess, and that's if they try to hit you first, and you swing back in self-defense. You can't just go around hitting people all the time, just because you don't like what they say to you. You're going to get into serious trouble."
"I am not," I said. "Not this time. I totally got caught, and Mr. Goodhart didn't even say anything. He just told me to go home."
"Yeah," Ruth said. "Because there was a suspected murderer in his office! He was probably just a little distracted."
"Mark Leskowski," I said, "is not a murderer. What's more, he thoroughly supported my breaking Karen Sue's face. He says she's a wannabe."
"Oh, God," Ruth said. "Why was I cursed with such a screwed-up best friend?"
Since I had just been thinking the same nice thing about her, I did not take offense.
"Let's practice together," I said, "at nine. Okay?" Since we live next door to one another, we frequently open our living room windows and play at the same time, giving the neighborhood a free concert, while also getting in some valuable practice time.
"Okay," Ruth said. "But if you think you can just pop Karen Sue Hankey in the face and never hear about it again, you're the one with another think coming, girlfriend."
I laughed as I hurried up the steps to my house. As if! Karen Sue would probably be so afraid of me from now on, I'd never have to put up with her noxious taunting again. As an added bonus, she probably wasn't going to play so well during her chair audition on Thursday, on account of her swollen nose.
It was with these delicious thoughts that I slipped into the house. I had set only one foot on the stairs leading up to my room when my mother's voice, not sounding too pleased, reached me from the kitchen.
Meekly, I made my way to the back of the house.
"Hi, Mom," I said when I saw her at the kitchen table. To my surprise, my dad was there, too.
But my dad never got home before six on a Tuesday.
"Hey, Dad," I said, noting that neither one of them looked particularly happy. Then my heart started to thump uncomfortably.
"What's the matter?" I asked quickly. "Is Douglas—"
"Douglas," my mother said, her voice so hard it was like ice, "is fine."
"Oh." I looked at the two of them. "It isn't—"
"Michael," my mother said, in that same hard voice, "is also fine."
Relief coursed through me. Well, if it wasn't Douglas, and it wasn't Mike, it couldn't be too bad. Maybe it was even something good. You know, something my parents would think was bad, but I might think was good. Like Great-aunt Rose having dropped dead from a heart attack, for instance.
"So," I said, preparing to look sad. "What's up?"
"We got a call a little while ago," my father said, looking grim.
"You'll never guess who it was," said my mother.
"I give up," I said, thinking, Wow, Great-aunt Rose really is dead. "Who was it?"
"Mrs. Hankey," my mother said. "Karen Sue's mother."
Oops.
C H A P T E R
7
Busted.
I was so busted.
But you know, I really don't think they had any right to be so mad, seeing as how I was defending the family honor and all.
And what a whiny baby, that Karen Sue, ratting me out to her mother. Of course, in Karen Sue's version of the events leading up to my punching her in the face, she hadn't said any of the things we both know she'd really said. In Karen Sue's version of how it all happened, I was trying to sneak out of assembly, and she tried to stop me—for my own good, of course, and because my leaving early was besmirching Amber Mackey's memory—and I hit her for her efforts.
The whole part about how my denying my psychic powers was what making Douglas sick? Yeah, Karen Sue left that part out.
Oh, and the part about how Douglas doesn't attend church or pray often enough? Yeah, left that part out, too.
My mom didn't believe me when I told her about that part. See, Karen Sue has my mom snowed, just like she's got her own mother snowed. All my mom sees when she looks at Karen Sue is the daughter she always wished she had. You know, the sweet compliant daughter who enters her homemade cookies in the county fair bake-off every year, and puts her hair in curlers at night so the ends will flip just the right way in the morning. My mom never counted on having a daughter like me, who is saving up for a Harley and has her hair cut as short as she possibly can so she won't have to mess with it.
And oh, yeah, who gets into fights all the time, and is in love with a guy who is on probation.
My poor mom.
My dad believed me. The part about what Karen Sue said and all. My mom, like I said before, didn't.
I heard them arguing about it after I was banished to my room, to Think About What I Had Done. I was also supposed to think about how I was going to pay back Karen Sue's medical bill (two hundred and forty nine dollars for a trip to the emergency room. She didn't even have to get stitches). Mrs. Hankey was also threatening to sue me for the mental anguish I'd inflicted on her daughter. Karen Sue's mental anguish, according to her mother, was worth about five thousand dollars. I didn't have five thousand dollars. I only had about a thousand dollars left in my bank account, after my Michigan City outlet store shopping spree.
I was supposed to sit in my room and think about how I was going to raise another four thousand, two hundred and forty-nine dollars.
Instead, I went into Douglas's room to see what he was doing.
"Hey, loser," I started to say as I barged in, as is my tradition where Douglas is concerned. "Guess what happened to me to—"
Only I didn't finish, because Douglas wasn't there.
Yeah, that's right. He wasn't in his room. About eight million comic books were lying around his bed, but no Douglas.
Which was kind of weird. Because Douglas, ever since he got sent home from State College for trying to kill himself, never went anywhere. Seriously. He just sat in his room, reading.
Oh, sure, sometimes Dad forced him to go to one of the restaurants and bus tables or whatever, but except for that and when he was at his shrink's office, Douglas was always in his room.
Always.
Maybe, I decided, he'd run out of comic books and gone downtown to get more. That made sense. Because the few times he had strayed from his room in the past six months, that's where he'd gone.
It was no fun sitting in my room, thinking about what I'd done. For one thing, I didn't think what I'd done was so bad. For another, it was August, so it was still pretty nice out, for late afternoon. I sat in the dormer window and gazed down at the street. My room is on the third floor of our house—in the attic, actually, which is the former servants' quarters. Our house is the oldest one on Lumley Lane, built around the turn of the century. The twentieth century. The city even came and put a plaque on it (the house, I mean), saying it was a historic landmark.
From the third floor dormer windows—my bedroom windows—you could see all up and down Lumley Lane. For once there was no white van parked across the street, monitoring my activities. That's because Special Agents Johnson and Smith were back at the school with Mark Leskowski.
Poor Mark. I had no way of knowing how he must be feeling—I mean, if Rob ever turned up dead, God only knew what I'd do, and we'd never even gone out. Well, for more than like five minutes, anyway. And if I got blamed for having done it—you know, killing him—I'd flip out for true.