I had broken a promise. Back when I was starting freshman year, Dad had said, “Can you do something for me?”
“Probably,” I had replied.
“Make sure I don’t ever receive a phone call from either the police or the hospital. That’s all I ask from you.”
“Consider it done.”
As I climbed my way to consciousness amid the huffing and beeping machines of a hospital room, I saw the old man slumped in a chair in the corner. To defuse things, I made a joke. “So which one called you first?”
His phone and the TV remote were resting on his chest, and when he sat up, they fell to the floor, which changed the channel on the TV from a football game to a newscast with a scroll across the bottom that my blurry eyes couldn’t read but my blurry brain guessed was about the death toll in Covington, and how it was now up to six. Jack the Ripper killed only five people, in case you were wondering. (Though I don’t know why you’d be wondering about Jack the Ripper. Weirdo.)
“Baby,” Dad said as he leapt to his feet. “Sweetie. Cutie.”
His foot must’ve been asleep because he hobbled over and put his hands on my face and held my cheeks, really held them, like he was trying to hold me together, which maybe he was.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“In the café talking to your friend,” he said as he pulled his hands away and gazed in my eyes.
“Dylan?” I asked. “Tess?”
Dad shook his head. “The FBI agent.”
Notice how he didn’t introduce Rosetti as “that hard-ass fed who’s super pissed at you for messing up her perfectly good drug sting.” He said “friend.” As in friendly. Which wasn’t a side of the special agent I knew, but one I wanted to know. What with her being my hero and all.
“Am I . . . is everything . . . ?”
I sat up, which was actually easier than I expected. I ached. I was dizzy, but dizzy was hardly a new sensation for me.
“You have a mild concussion,” he said. “Some bruises and sprains but, thankfully, you’re still you. You’re still you.”
But who was I at this point? The girl who’d been splattered by four spontaneous combustions? The girl who’d been pulled from a mangled car? The girl who survived? Which is a horrible thing to be sometimes.
“Was it only the twins?” I asked. “The car didn’t hit anyone, did it?”
“Quilts,” Dad said. “Expensive ones, I guess, but quilts are nothing but quilts.”
I’m sure the proprietors of the Covington Quilt Museum would protest such a notion, but I suspect the proprietors of the Covington Quilt Museum doth protest too much. They were undoubtedly part of the next wave of fist-shakers who quickly jumped on the bandwagon that I had helped launch. Because as the blur slipped from my eyes, I could finally read the breaking news.
PRESIDENT CALLS SITUATION “A NATIONAL TRAGEDY” AS SEVENTH VICTIM OF THE COVINGTON CURSE CONFIRMED.
And there was a picture of Kamal Patel in all his stonerific, assholish glory.