First: wakey wakey.
Next one: i need 2 talk 2 u.
Last one: call granna.
I didn’t call Granna, of course. I called James. He picked up before the first ring had even finished.
“What are you, sleeping in a coffin these days? I’ve been trying to get you for hours.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Did you call Granna?”
I climbed out of bed, stiff from sleeping in my jeans. “No, I called you. You called me fourteen times, so I figured it was important.”
“It is important. I think something’s happened to your grandmother.”
“Huh?”
“Call it my spidey sense. Did she bring you that stuff she was making?”
Come to think of it, she hadn’t. I felt a little guilty for forgetting about it. “No. She didn’t call, either. Is this your crystal ball spidey sense we’re talking about, or just common sense?”
“Crystal ball. Would you please just call her and find out if I’m right? I mean, I hope I’m not, but I’ve had the most awful feeling about it since early this morning. I couldn’t sleep. I even did a Deirdre.”
“You threw up?”
“Yeah. Please call?”
“Okay, okay. I’ll let you know.”
I hung up, but before I had a chance to call Granna’s number, Mom shouted my name from downstairs. She had that barely-in-control sound to her voice that meant someone was going to fry.
Oh. What if she knew about last night? She would torture me, kill me, and then perform a black rite to resurrect me to kill me again if she found out. Mom had never bothered to have the sex talk with me—that might have actually required finding out how I felt about something—but she’d made it quite clear what she thought of girls that did more than hold hands with their boyfriends. I still remembered the time she dropped me off at Dave’s Ice when I first started, and Sara was kissing her boyfriend in the parking lot. I remembered wondering why I would want someone’s tongue in my ear, and then Mom saying, “Girls like that have no self-respect. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”
I kinda wondered what Luke’s tongue would feel like in my ear.
“Deirdre!” Mom shouted again. I stalled, scrubbing off the bottoms of my feet so it didn’t look so much like I’d been wandering around the neighborhood all night. “Don’t make me come up there!”
I steeled myself and headed down to the kitchen. Mom, Delia, and Dad were posted at various points in the room, all holding coffee cups, all looking tired and strained in the strong late-morning light coming in the windows. So it was to be three on one. Hardly seemed fair.
“Good morning,” I said. Admit nothing, that was my plan.
Mom barely looked at me; she gulped her coffee before speaking. “You’re supposed to be at work this afternoon, right?”
The question was so far from what I’d expected that my voice was a bit incredulous. “Yeah, at one.”
“Dad can drop you off, but James will have to pick you up, or if he can’t, you’ll have to call in and take time off. I can’t get you.” She drained her coffee cup and set it in the sink. Dad looked hangdog, and I bet a fight had preceded my arrival.
Mom continued. “Delia and I have to go to the hospital.”
With a faint prickle of dread, I echoed her. “The hospital?”
Delia withdrew an enormous set of keys from her purse and took my mother’s arm firmly. “Granna fell down or something. The EMTs aren’t sure. It’s probably nothing serious.”
“Fell down?” I repeated again. Other people’s grandmothers fell down. Granna wasn’t the frail, falling-down type. She was the hauling-and-painting-furniture type. She was the beating-herbs-into-green-pulp-to-drive-off-the-faeries type. For some reason, I thought of Eleanor’s fearsome smile right before she’d left.
“Or something,” Delia said loudly, louder, if possible, than her usual voice. “We’re just going to see if she’s all right. I’m sure she’ll be released shortly. It’s just precautions.”
Mom glared at Delia, and I wondered what that argument had been.
Impervious to the slings and arrows of her sister, Delia looked regally down at me. “You saw her yesterday, Deirdre. Did anything seem unusual to you?”
I had probably been too self-absorbed yesterday to notice anything out of place. The only unusual thing there yesterday had been me. I shook my head. “She seemed fine.”
Mom shot a triumphant look at Delia. “Let’s go.”
The two of them pushed through the door, leaving Dad and me alone. As usual, he was quiet, all the words he might have said already used up by Delia and Mom. Finally, he scratched his chin and looked at me. “You’re seeing that flute player from the competition?”
Talking with Mom was difficult: you had to follow rules and play her games. Dad was easy. I nodded.
“Do you like him?”
I didn’t feel embarrassed, but my cheeks reddened anyway as I admitted the truth. “A lot.”
“He like you?”
“A lot.”
Dad nodded and got his car keys from the hook by the door. “I’m glad. I’m going to go get the AC running in the car. Meet me out there when you’re ready to go, okay?” He let himself softly out the back door, as quiet as Mom and Delia were loud, and I went back upstairs to get changed into something that didn’t smell quite so strongly of wet grass and staying out all night.
Upstairs, as I was transferring my phone to the back pocket of a nice pair of jeans for work, it rang. I looked at the number, but didn’t recognize it.
“Hello?”
“Hi.”
I recognized Luke’s voice at once, and despite everything, I shivered. In a good way. “You have a phone?”
“I do now. I never had anybody I wanted to talk to before.” He paused. “Do you want to talk to me?”
“I shouldn’t.” I remembered Dad waiting in the car and began to hunt for a clean pair of socks. “But I do. I just keep thinking you’re going to bust out an explanation for what I saw in your head last night.”
There was silence.
“Is this the phone version of that sad face you do where you say you can’t tell me anything?”
“Yeah, I guess it is. I guess I was hoping that you’d see something that would counteract all those—the—that stuff—when you read my mind.”
“Is there something that would counteract all that?”
Luke sighed. “Better count this as another phone version of the sad face.”
I had more important things to ask him, but curiosity pushed me forward. “What happens when you can’t tell me something? Does your tongue freeze, or what?”
He paused. “It’s painful. My throat seizes up, sort of. I never know exactly what’s going to set it off, so I try to avoid it.”
“What about writing it down?”
“That would hurt. A lot.”
“So … telling me who is keeping you from talking would definitely cause you problems.”
“Just thinking about telling you that makes my tonsils go cold,” Luke said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Can I see you today?”
I contemplated just how idiotic that would be. Then I remembered. “Luke, Granna’s in the hospital. My mom just left with Delia. They said she fell down or something. But—”
“Granna doesn’t fall down,” Luke finished.
I hesitated. “Do you think that it could be—”
“Maybe. Do you want me to visit her? I’d be able to tell.”
“She hates you.”
“She’s not the only one. What about us? Can I see you again? You can say no. You’d crush all my hopes and dreams, but it’s an option.”
I pulled on my shoes while I thought. I could probably blame my hormones for all this. For my complete lack of ethics. A friggin’ pile of dead bodies and here I was allowing myself cold chills at the idea of seeing him again. Oh man, and if he kissed me again, I’d probably explode. Earth-to-Deirdre. Snap out of it. We’re talking killer here, remember? But maybe there was a reason for the bodies. Or maybe I was just being pitifully hopeful. Out loud, I reasoned, “So, there just might be something to counteract what I saw in your head.”
“I think I am allowed to say a definite maybe.”
“And you aren’t going to kill me.”
The smile vanished from his voice. “I promise you that. If nothing else, I promise you that. I won’t ever hurt you.”
I wondered what it was like to have a normal relationship, where you didn’t have to ask these sorts of questions. Would I feel the same about him if he just had a normal life and a normal past? I made my decision. “Then I’ll see you later.”
“You’ve made my day, pretty girl. I’m off to visit your granny. Keep my secret with you.” The phone went dead in my hand.
Dave’s Ice was officially dead. The hazy blue-gray sky of earlier had traded in its stifling heat for growing knots of storm clouds, and no one was in the mood to get ice cream. I leaned against the counter, staring out the large pane-glass windows at the gathering clouds and playing with the iron key, sliding it back and forth on its chain. I could think of one thousand places I’d rather be.
I didn’t want to look at the clock, because it would just remind me how much longer I had to stay here. I didn’t want to read old text messages from James, because that would just remind me how nobody had called and updated me on Granna yet.
“He gave you that, didn’t he?” Sara interrupted my boredom. She leaned against the other side of the counter, revealing a lot more of her cleavage than I’d ever wanted to see. Even though she was wearing the same chaste Dave’s apron I was, she’d managed to find a shirt that made it look like all she was wearing was the chaste Dave’s apron.
I glanced up at her. “Yeah.”
“I saw you guys on that first day, sitting out by the car. He really is cute.”
“Yeah.”
Sara leaned toward me, conspiratorial. “And older. He’s a senior, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
She poked a finger in her ear and squinted out the window as if trying to see what I was looking at. “I know I said it before, but I just can’t get over, like, that someone like you ended up with someone like him. No offense. Seriously, no offense.”
Previously, on Deirdre’s Life: in the last installment of our show, Deirdre receives casual put-down from Sara, and because Deirdre’s socially paralyzed, she takes it without a squeak.
This week on Deirdre’s Life: Deirdre fights back.
I rolled my eyes toward her. “I think older guys go for a more subtle look, don’t you?”
Sara followed my gaze down into the cavern between her breasts. “I—uh—never noticed. Do they?”
“Yes,” I said firmly, warming to my theory. “You know, younger guys want arm candy. Older guys want depth.” I swallowed a smile and went in for the kill. “It’s why I wouldn’t date any of the guys from school.” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with her—like we were friends. I wondered if this was how the other girls in high school were, the ones that babbled in front of their lockers about their boyfriends and the music they liked. Maybe they were all just pretending to be buddy-buddy, when really they knew nothing about each other.