Still, she was Perri. The smart one, the funny one, the one with the best ideas. She was the one who had dropped them, although the school didn’t spin it that way, couldn’t see how much Kat and Josie missed Perri when she distanced herself from them last fall-suddenly, viciously, without any explanation. Just because they were two and she was one didn’t make it any easier to bear. Especially given the fact that Kat was as strangely silent on the topic as Perri was.
The memory of how her two friends had looked, after, rushed over Josie, and she glanced around frantically. There was a plastic trash can near her bed, but she had to lean out at a perilous angle. She tried to throw up silently, but it was too hard maintaining that posture while vomiting, and the sound of retching woke her father.
“Oh, Josie.” Her father tucked her hair behind her ears, fetched a towel from the bathroom, and wiped her face. He was still in his office clothes-the embarrassing short-sleeved shirt and polyester old-man pants-and his BO was a little funky. He must have sweated a lot today. Her father’s sweat didn’t smell like anyone else’s-it wasn’t worse, just different-and Josie had always feared that it had something to do with being Indian, that her own perspiration would have this same foreign undercurrent. So far it didn’t, but you never knew.
“I was worried the codeine and the sedative would be hard on your stomach, but the doctor kept saying he didn’t want the pain to get ahead of itself. How’s the foot?”
“It feels kind of…fiery.”
“Yeah. There may be some bone chips in there. They took the bullet out, but they still need an orthopedic surgeon to go over the X-rays.”
“Am I going to be okay? I mean, totally normal, so I can-Dad, what about my scholarship? If I can’t do acrobatics, if I end up with a limp…Dad, Dad-”
“You’re the lucky one, Josie. We’re the lucky ones. That’s all that matters for now.”
Her father’s voice became thick and strange, as if he might begin to cry, an idea that made Josie even more frantic. “Dad…Dad…Dad.”
“What, Josie?”
But she didn’t know how to deny him his tears, so she said instead, “Can I have a Sprite or a ginger ale to settle my stomach?”
“You bet, Josefina.” It was his private pet name for her, one he hadn’t used for years. “You bet.”
He left her room, whistling one of the songs he liked to play on the guitar-“The Best I Ever Had”-as if he wanted her to be able to know where he was once he was out of view. A nurse must have reproved him, for Josie heard a soft but stern female voice, chiding in tone, and the whistling stopped abruptly. But Josie could still hear her father’s shoes, slapping down the corridor in search of a vending machine. Oh, God, he was wearing his Tevas.
She thought she had nothing left to throw up, but the moment she tried to close her eyes, the room began to spin and the bile rose again, until nothing came out, her mouth opening and shutting almost convulsively. Wasn’t there a movie where a woman had honked silently the way Josie was now? Or was she thinking about someone in real life, someone odd, someone her mother had told Josie to stop staring at, a long time ago, when Josie was little and didn’t know better. Yes, that was it. Back when she was in middle school, there was a woman who looked like a goose, with a long, skinny neck and flying brown hair, and after each sentence she had opened her mouth wide and made a clicking sound deep in her throat. She had worked at the sandwich shop in the Strand, one of the first strip centers in the area. The woman looked straight at you while taking your order, and she seemed to speak more than was strictly necessary, as if to flaunt her disability, make you confront it. Her thin, long lips opened wide, and the strange snap echoed at the end of every sentence. “Do-you-want-cheese-with-that?” Snap. “What-do-you-think-of-the-weather-we’re-having?” Snap. When they were in middle school and wanted to buy sandwiches after school, they used to take turns going in. (If they tried to enter the store together, they ended up laughing too hysterically, and they were not unkind, not really.) Whenever it was Perri’s turn, she always convinced one of the others to do it for her. Kat would try to coax her: “It wasn’t so bad, she’s really very nice.” “So why don’t you go in every time?” Perri asked. “Because it’s not fair,” Kat countered. “We’re supposed to take turns.” Yet the next time it was Perri’s turn, Kat or Josie would end up going for her.
The sandwich shop had disappeared, replaced by a Caribou Coffee, and the woman had disappeared, too. Things in Glendale were always disappearing, changing-the open spaces that were supposed to be left untouched, the original houses such as the Patels’, which were now being torn down right and left. And now Kat was gone, and perhaps Perri, too. It had been horrible, waiting there with them, listening to the strange, labored sound of Perri’s breathing, looking, then trying not to look, at Kat’s waxy features beneath the fluorescent lights. There was no place to look safely, except the ceiling, which Josie had never noticed before. White, pockmarked, divided into squares by aluminum bands.
Finally the policemen had knocked, asking her to unlock the door, but Josie couldn’t get up, she just couldn’t. “Can you walk, honey? Can you crawl?” “Yes-no. I mean, I’m okay, but I can’t get up, I just can’t.” “You don’t have the gun, do you-what’s your name? Who are we talking to?” “I’m Josie. I’m not the one who did this. It was Perri, and she’s-” “Is she dead? Did she shoot herself?” “Yes. No. I mean, yes, she shot herself, but I don’t think she’s dead. She’s…it’s-Please find someone to unlock the door. I don’t want to look at them anymore.” But they had kept talking to her, disbelieving. “You don’t have the gun, do you…Josie? It’s Josie, right? You’re sure you’re not holding the gun?”
“I never touched the gun.” Finally a key turned in the lock, and she began to sob when she saw the police officers enter with their weapons drawn. Then everything had speeded up, with paramedics rushing in, taking away Perri, then Josie. Yes, it was Perri, she told them over and over. Perri had done this. Shot Kat, shot Josie, then herself. Perri. It was Perri, only Perri.
“What about Kat?” she had asked as they wheeled her out. “Aren’t you going to get Kat?”
“Your friend has to stay here a little while longer,” the attendant had said, soothing her as if she were stupid enough to think Kat was alive. “The important thing is to get you to the emergency room, have that foot looked at. You were smart to wrap it like you did and prop it up, but we need to attend to that.”
“I don’t want to go without Kat. She’s my best friend. I want to be with her. You can’t separate us. You can’t, you can’t.”
She knew she was being hysterical and idiotic. But there was a part of her that clung to the idea that everything could be undone
somehow, if they would just let her stay, give her five more minutes with the two girls who had defined her life for the last ten years, almost from the first day she had walked into Mrs. Groves’s class at Meeker Creek Elementary School. One for all and all for one, the eternal triangle. She finally knew what she needed to make everything right again.