Chapter Five

 

The first night of winter break, I could smell Mom making hot chocolate—the good kind with real chocolate that she melted on the stove. She was probably hoping the aroma would beckon to me. I wanted to fight it, but the pull of steamy chocolate was too strong. I let my feet carry me into the kitchen.

Mom was still in her work clothes—black slacks and an off-white collared blouse. She'd wound her orange chiffon scarf around the back of one of the kitchen chairs. She smiled at me as I stood in the doorway, and pointed to bottles of flavoring on the counter.

"Mocha or mint?" she asked. "Or something else?"

I scrutinized the bottles. "Hazelnut?"

"Hazelnut it is."

Mom stirred the chocolate, watching it carefully. She'd put the flavoring in at the very end, since it didn't need to cook.

"Do you want to go see a movie tomorrow?" she asked without looking up at me.

"I don't know," I said. Mom liked to go to movies about women who got cancer or whose mothers had nervous breakdowns. I couldn't do it. Even a mindless disaster movie would feature too much death.

"I just thought," Mom said, still stirring, "that it might get your mind off things."

If people wanted to get my mind off things, they'd stop reminding me to get my mind off them. Besides, I wasn't entirely sure I should. If your best friend died, that seemed like the sort of thing that ought to stay on your mind for a while.

"We could even go tonight, if you want," Mom said. She pulled out two mugs and poured in the chocolate, followed by flavoring. She had to shake the hazelnut bottle to squeeze out the last drops. "It's not a school night."

I shrugged. "I think I'm going to practice."

"At night?" Mom asked, blowing on the top of her drink. "The neighbors don't like that."

"They went to their cabin for Christmas," I said.

She took a sip, and nodded. "So they did."

"Thanks for the chocolate," I said, and I turned to take it up to my room.

"Kira?" Mom said.

I winced. Here it was. The lecture about how I wasn't handling my feelings appropriately. The plea for me to tell her what I was thinking. The suggestion that I ought to talk to a therapist, as if that ever helped Haylee.

But when I pivoted back, Mom was staring down into her chocolate. "Yes?" I asked.

"I'm here if you need to talk," she said.

Mom talked to kids at the middle school all day long about their problems. That was her job as the school psychologist. She had to attend meeting after meeting about behavior modification plans, resources, and support. It wasn't really her fault that talking to teenagers put her into therapy mode. Fixing kids was her job. When I was in middle school, the teachers used to tell me how lucky I was to have a mother who really understood.

But they were wrong. The only person who understood me was Haylee.

"Thanks, Mom," I said. And I turned and walked up the stairs. A few drops of chocolate sloshed over the edge of the mug, stinging my thumb.

Up in my room, I let the hot chocolate cool on my nightstand, and picked up my cell phone. It hadn't rung much over the last week. Even Nick hadn't called.

At this point, there was only one other person I wanted to talk to.

Bradley Johansen.

I had Bradley's number from an English project we all did in September. Haylee talked my ear off all day about him, but when we all worked together on the project, she didn't say word one. If she kept that up on their date, it was no wonder she didn't want to talk to me about it.

I dialed, and the phone rang in my ear: once, twice, three times. I'd called before, so I probably looked like a stalker. But it wasn't until this time that I realized he probably didn't have my number in his phone anymore. If I didn't recognize the number that was calling, I wouldn't pick up, either.

That meant I ought to leave a message. "This is Kira," I said to his voicemail. "I want to talk to you about . . . things."

Things? Things? Brilliant. I paused, trying to think of what to say next, but I'd already trailed a silence behind my genius statement, so I hung up.

I hoped Bradley wasn't one of those people who never checked their messages.

My cocoa was cool enough to drink, so I downed it and threw on some warm-ups and sneakers, grabbed my glove, and headed downstairs and out the back door.

The moon and stars were out, but as I flipped on the back light they seemed to dim. We lived in a townhouse, so our backyard was really more of a patio. There wasn't much room, but if I stood on one side and tossed a softball against the far fence, I had just enough space for pitching practice. I'd been playing softball since I was eight for the local community league. Try-outs for the high school teams were in January—we all had to do them again, even if we were on last year's team. I'd been a relief pitcher last season, which was better than not pitching at all. If I made starting pitcher this year, I'd be in good shape for the Varsity team as a junior.

Mom and I had propped a board against the fence and outlined a square on it with blue electrical tape, about the right size and height for a strike zone. I wished I could go over to practice with Aaron, since practicing with a person was so much better than practicing with a fence.

My stomach dropped. Maybe he'd found the journal. If he had, we'd never practice together again.

I dragged my bucket of balls over and looked at the strike square. I set, then swung my arm around and stepped forward, releasing the ball, feeling the familiar pop of my hip. The ball hit the fence about two feet to the left of the square.

I kicked myself for not practicing more. I needed to warm up, sure, but I'd never get to start if I threw like that.

Ball after ball thwacked against the fence. Too high. Too low. Inside. Outside. I stopped to take a deep breath, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Aaron said it was no use continuing to throw bad pitches, because I'd only teach myself to do it wrong.

I stood with my right shoulder to the fence and set again. Nothing else matters, I told myself. Just me and the ball.

The next one hit the left edge of the square with a satisfying smack. Not perfect, but better.

I emptied the bucket, then picked up all the balls and emptied it again. It felt good to be moving. After fifty pitches or so I got into my groove, and ball after ball hit the square. I started focusing on putting the ball where I wanted it: high left, low right, dead center, high center. I smiled to myself. At last, something I could control. I emptied the bucket one more time and stood there, looking at the balls that had rolled all over the concrete.

If I stood very still, the night seemed like any other. I could finish practice, shower, and run over to Haylee's house for an hour or two. It wasn't even a school night. I could sleep over if I wanted. We could watch movies until dawn and then sleep until noon.

But I couldn't do that ever again.

I sat down on the concrete, staring at my pitching square. The ground leached heat out of my legs through my warm-ups. I stared up at the moon, refusing to blink. If I just got my eyes started, like priming a pump, then surely I could cry. But my eyes just felt stiff, like I'd spent hours in a car with the windows down.

A chill brushed over me, and I could hear Haylee's voice in my head, clear as anything.

I would have cried, if you were the one who was dead.

And if that thought didn't make me cry, I didn't know what would.

 

I was halfway up the stairs when I heard my phone ringing in my room. I jogged up the remaining steps and threw my door open, grabbing my phone just in time to see Bradley's name.

"Hello?" I said.

"Hey, Kira," Bradley said.

But my brain didn't recalibrate fast enough, so I was all, "Oh, hi, Bradley! This is, um, Kira." And not only did I sound like I couldn't remember my name, but he had just said it himself.

But Bradley didn't seem to notice. He just said, "I got your message. What's up?"

If he'd hurt Haylee, shouldn't he sound guilty? I'd been sure he was avoiding me, and now here he was, calling me like we were friends. "Um," I said. "I called you a couple times."

"Sorry," he said. "If I'd realized it was you, I would have answered. I'd been expecting to hear from you. About Haylee."

Really? "You weren't at the funeral."

"Yeah, sorry about that. My mom wouldn't let me go. She wants me to lie low, since I was the last person to really spend time with Haylee. She says it looks bad. But I think that's crap, you know? A girl I went out with is dead. I should at least have shown up to her funeral."

Now I really didn't know what to say. He sounded like a guy Haylee had put in a bad situation, not a guy who was responsible for her death.

"Can you hold on a minute?" Bradley asked.

"Sure," I said. I listened to the silence on the other end of the phone, taking a moment to breathe. Right when I was thinking that maybe if I hung up on him he wouldn't call back, and maybe he'd forget about it by January when we went back to school, he picked up the phone again.

"Sorry. My mom just got home. I walked upstairs so she wouldn't hear."

"Oh, okay," I said.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

There was a big long pause, because I didn't know how to answer that question. Should I give him the F word, or should I tell him the truth? And what was the truth, anyway? How was I? That's when I realized I must be going absolutely crazy, because I couldn't answer the simplest of questions.

I dropped the F-bomb: "I'm fine." But right at that moment he decided to say something else so I ended up talking over him. We both laughed, though my laugh sounded fake, and I wondered if he noticed.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm a little out of it."

"I get that."

"So why weren't you at school?"

Bradley sighed. "My mom is freaking out. The cops came by my house the night after it happened."

So I wasn't the only one who thought he was suspicious. "Are you serious?" I asked.

"Yeah. I told them everything I could. They wanted to know if anything happened, you know? If I knew why she did it."

I sucked in my breath. "What did you tell them?"

"I didn't know what to say. I keep going over the night in my head, trying to figure it out. Did I do something or say something? But I don't know what could have set her off."

My grip loosened on the phone. "I know how that is," I said. "Haylee didn't always need a reason to get upset." I bit my lip. I didn't like talking about Haylee in the past tense, and I didn't like talking behind her back, even if she couldn't possibly find out.

Bradley just breezed on. "So my mom wanted me to stay home until after the break. She thinks if I do that, everything will blow over."

My grip tightened on the phone again. "She thinks people will forget Haylee. She wants them to."

Bradley sighed. "I know. It's crap, like I said. Not that I want people to think I did something to her, but it seems pretty self-serving to want people to forget her just so they don't talk behind my back."

The silence stretched on and on, but I didn't know how to break it. Bradley didn't know what happened to her any better than I did. He was just another dead end.

I'd started working on ways to get out of the conversation gracefully when Bradley said, "Do you want to hang out tomorrow?"

I swallowed. I couldn't hold a five minute phone conversation. How would I handle talking to him in person?

"Cause I've had my license over six months," he said. "I can pick you up."

I'd forgotten that Bradley was older than the rest of us. His parents sent him to kindergarten a year late so he'd be old for his grade and have a better chance at sports. And I guess it worked, because Bradley made varsity last year, while I was on JV with the rest of the freshmen.

"Kira?" he asked. "Are you still there?"

"Yeah," I said. And to save us from another big long pause, I said, "Sure. Let's get together."

"You must miss Haylee a lot."

I hesitated, and then said, "Yeah, I do."

"Yeah," he said. "This sucks."

For some reason, that was the first response to Haylee's death that I appreciated. He wasn't trying to tell me he understood, or make me feel better. He just made the obvious statement. Haylee's death sucked. Like a wet vac. Like a whirlpool. Like a freaking class five tornado.

"So, I'll pick you up at noon, okay?"

I said okay, and we both hung up. I sat on the floor of my room, with my phone still to my ear. I half expected Bradley to call back and tell me he was just kidding. Why would he want to hang out with me?

But even if Bradley hadn't caused Haylee's death, he might know things he didn't even know that he knew. He wasn't close to Haylee. He didn't know how to read her.

There was still hope to find out what happened through him. I just needed to get him to tell me everything that happened, detail by detail.

And first, I had to figure out how to pitch this to my mother.