Damage Done (8 page)

And it turned out I wasn’t the loudest person in the stands. Liv, who had been the one to tell me to stay away from him, to give him space, had been the biggest cheerer of all.

“So Alane is in show choir?” Michael asked.

I jumped, feeling almost as if I’d walked through a portal to the future. I hadn’t, though; I’d just walked to the chorus room. “Yeah,” I said. “She’s lead soprano. She totally rocks.”

“Ah,” Michael said, cradling my clarinet case in his arms like a baby. “You’re quite a musical pair, you two.”

I was in the middle of rolling my eyes when Alane rushed out, her cheeks pink. Most of the choir kids had already packed up and left, their chatter a stream in the hallway. “Sorry, Lucy,” she panted. “There was a…oh, hi, Michael.”

“Hi, Alane.”

“You don’t need to drive me home today,” I said. “I’m going to go home with Michael.”

This stopped the flow of speech, but not for long. “Oh, okay,” she said. “Oh, but Lucy. There was a guy in show choir asking questions about you. It was creepy. I finally threatened to call the cops, and he left.”

“My dad’s a cop,” Michael said, already reaching for his phone. I automatically laid a hand on my clarinet case to keep it from falling. “Want me to call—”

“What did he look like?” I asked, my stomach lurching as I imagined what she’d say.
Smart glasses. Rumpled suit.

“Tall and thin,” she said. “Old. Like thirty, maybe. And he had these square glasses. He was kind of cute. Like, in a nerdy way.”

My stomach clenched like a fist. “He was asking questions? He asked for me by name?” He’d probably been hoping to find me alone.

“Yeah,” Alane said. “Your middle name, even. It’s Julia, isn’t it? Lucy Julia Black. I don’t remember you ever telling…”

Whatever she was saying faded into a roar. My heart was thumping so hard I thought it might bust free and break through my chest in a shower of viscera. I’d flop around on the floor like a dying fish while Alane looked on, chattering about my middle name.

I grabbed her by the shoulders, my fingers digging into the soft muscle. I could tell from her sudden wince that I was hurting her, and I didn’t care. “Where did he go?” I shook her a little bit, and Michael grabbed me by the arm.

“Hey, now,” he said. My fingers loosened, and I realized that Alane’s eyes were shiny, her breathing fast and shallow.

“Sorry,” I said, and let her go. “But did you see where he went? It’s important.”

She rubbed her shoulder. I could see the indentations I’d left in her shirt; her efforts were doing nothing to smooth them out. “Out toward the student parking lot,” she said. “Lucy, are you okay?”

I was already moving. “I need to find him,” I called. Michael’s footsteps sounded behind me, keeping pace, but Alane hung back, the noise of her breathing getting smaller and smaller and smaller until I couldn’t hear her at all.

I burst into the sunshine and scanned the parking lot frantically, shading my eyes. I couldn’t let him get away this time. I ducked and craned through the parking lot, through the rows of cars, through the clusters of kids, until finally, there he was, black suit and all, climbing into a car at the far side of the lot. There was no way I’d reach him before he pulled out, so I made a snap and potentially incredibly stupid decision.

“Michael, we need to get in your car now and follow that one,” I said, pointing. His mouth opened, and I knew he was going to ask why. “I’ll explain later,” I said, vibrating with impatience. “We just need to go.” I couldn’t keep doing this. If Spence wanted me alone, he’d get me alone. Michael could wait in the car and run Spence over if he got too threatening. Michael was, apparently, good at running people down.

If Michael’s car hadn’t been parked only two spots away, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably sank to my knees and cried right there on the pavement. But he
was
parked only two spots away, and miraculously there wasn’t anyone right behind us, so we were peeling out of the parking lot in thirty seconds flat, the back of Spence’s car a respectable three vehicles ahead. I admittedly knew zero about cars, but even I could tell his was nice: black, shiny, and sleek, its make one of the
L
s: Lamborghini, Lexus, Lincoln.

Spence took a hard right. Two of the cars between us drifted straight, but Michael obediently carried us right. “Is that him?” he asked. “Your ex?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s old,” he said, his voice as taut as a guitar string. “I should call my dad. Remember the license plate.”

Idea noted. I typed the number in my phone:
3
RTR
779
.

Spence’s car made a left. We were now directly behind him. I could see his head bobbing above the seat.

“Seriously, I think we should pull over and call my dad,” Michael said. “If he’s stalking you, following him could be dangerous.”

“We need to follow him.” My heart rapped against my ribs. “I need to know where he’s going. Where he’s staying. He can’t keep popping up like this.”

“We can put an alert on the car.” Decision seemingly made, Michael coasted toward the side of the road.

No. No. I couldn’t lose Spence, not again. I couldn’t let him go.

As soon as we stopped, I threw open the door and stepped out of the car, fully ready to follow Spence wherever he was going. I didn’t even think about how slowly I would be going in comparison to Spence. Maybe my ankles would sprout wings. I was on the right side, after all. The good side. The hero always wins.

I only made it maybe twenty feet before I felt the fingers close around my arm.
Spence.
I jerked away before my mind could remind me that
Hello, Lucy, you just saw Spence drive off in front of you; there’s no possible way he could be behind you now.

It was Michael, of course. “Lucy, are you okay?” Michael said, and he touched me again on the arm. He wasn’t grabbing me this time; his fingers were gentle, and his voice was deeper than I’d ever heard it before.

“He got away,” I said flatly. I couldn’t believe I’d let Spence escape. Again. It was almost a comedy of errors at this point. “Of course I’m not okay. Because he’ll be back, and he might kill me.” Or worse. I’d rather be dead than be Julia Vann, and all that it entailed, again.

“It’ll be okay,” Michael said. “We’ll talk to my dad. I’ll have him look up the plate number. He can pay a visit to your ex’s house.”

“No!” The word burst out of me before I could stop myself. My head twinged with what felt like the beginning of a stress headache. Or a brain tumor. “Don’t send your dad. My ex is dangerous.”

“You were willing to send me after him.” I couldn’t tell whether he sounded proud or hurt. “Either way, we should talk to my dad. Let’s go to my house.”

I trailed after him. I didn’t have many other options.

Re: Ryan Vann, age 10

I spoke with Ryan’s parents when his session let out. As soon as he saw his whole family in the waiting room, Ryan raced out to take the seat next to his sister. They bent their heads together and whispered. As I approached, beckoning the parents into my office, the twins looked my way and giggled.

“Mr. and Mrs. Vann,” I said once I sat down, “Ryan feels he hasn’t been making much progress with the MST. You know how important it is that the family and school take part in this treatment. A psychologist can only do so much without the involvement of the family in this type of therapy. I wanted to check in on your progress.”

Both parents looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We’ve just been so busy,” the mother began.

“I’ve been traveling every week on business,” continued the father.

“And I’ve been so busy with class, with grading, it’s all I can do to keep a clean house and get the children fed.”

“We’re trying, Doctor, we swear. It might just take a little more time.”

“And the school?” I asked, struggling not to lose my temper. “Have you heard any news from the school?”

If possible, their expressions sank even deeper into discomfort. “We’ve received a few calls from the school therapist,” the mother said. “Apparently Ryan’s been skipping his sessions. I spoke to him about it, but with him, there’s only so much you can do….”

I couldn’t stop a flare of rage from sparking in my throat. “You sound like you’ve already given up on him,” I spat more than said. “He might improve on his own, but he might not.”

“What about medication?” the father asked. “Isn’t there something you can put him on?”

Medication. I couldn’t help but scoff. Anybody can just
medicate
someone. The behavior analysis unit won’t come knocking on the door of someone who gives up on fixing a sociopath and pumps him full of medication instead. Also, as a psychologist, I couldn’t actually prescribe medication, but that was beside the point. “In my professional opinion, medication would not be the best option here.” In my professional opinion, saying “in my professional opinion” is the best way to make people trust you. “The specific types of medication we would use aren’t a permanent solution and might be dangerous. They could turn him into someone entirely different. We just want to calm these urges. In my professional opinion, therapy continues to be the best option, but it has to be regular and it has to be done.”

“I know,” the mother said. “I know, I know, we know. We’ll try harder. We promise.”

I didn’t have high expectations when Ryan came in for his next session two weeks later. “How are you, Ryan?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said.

“How were your last two weeks?”

“Fine.”

“How are your talks with your parents and your school therapist going?”

“Fine.” He peeked up a bit at this last word and, I swear, I saw pure anguish in his eyes, so hot it nearly burned me. “My parents said you wouldn’t let them give me pills.”

“That’s right,” I said.

He blinked. “Thank you. I didn’t want to take pills.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and something softened in his eyes. I moved on to the therapy. “Have you been talking with your parents and your school therapist?”

“I heard my parents talking, and my mom said she was on some pills,” Ryan said. “She said they made her feel like a zombie sometimes. I don’t want to feel like a zombie.”

“I don’t want you to feel like a zombie, either,” I said. “How have your sessions been going? You have been talking with your parents and your school therapist, right?”

He stared at the floor, or his feet. “They said I should tell you yes.”

My heart sank to my feet. “So you haven’t been talking with your parents and school therapist?”

“No,” he muttered. He looked up, eagerly, I thought. “But I didn’t kill anything these last few weeks.” Eager. Like he was looking for approval.
My
approval. I’d made some kind of breakthrough. A tiny one.

Still, words stuck in my throat. What was someone supposed to say to that? “Well,” I said finally, for lack of anything else to say. “I’m glad to hear it. It sounds like you’re making progress.”

A smile lit up his face, flashing like a lightning streak. But quick as lightning, it was gone. “It won’t last, though.” He sounded disturbingly matter-of-fact. “Even if I really want it to.”

My stomach churned. “Anyone can change,” I said. “Even you. No matter what anyone else tells you.”

He gifted me another smile, though this one was sad, heavy. “No,” he said. It was patient—that was the word. He was smiling patiently at me, like suddenly he was the teacher and I was the student. “But you’re making a good effort. Really. And thank you again for the pills thing.”

No matter what I asked, no matter what I said, he wouldn’t say another word after that.

To be quite honest, I half expected Michael to dump me by the side of the road and speed off into the sunset, his car lightened of its burden of crazy. But he was too nice for that. I’d half expected that, too, so my two half expectations canceled each other out.

Instead, the ride back into town was quiet and uneventful aside from the throbbing of my head and the whiteness of Michael’s knuckles on the steering wheel. The stress of letting Spence get away had manifested itself physically as a horned demon that stomped on my brain and clawed at the inside of my skull. I would have welcomed it, if only it could have stopped me from wondering why Spence had gone to all the trouble of hunting me down and following me, only to run away whenever I got close.

The first one to die in the band room had been Evan Wilde, my ex-and/or forever-boyfriend. At least, that was what the coroners told the reporters; I didn’t remember anything from that day. Traumatic amnesia. It was fairly common, the doctors said, for someone who had suffered a trauma as big as the band room.

He’d been shot head-on, right between the eyes, standing against the back wall, his arms crossed over his chest. He wasn’t in band, you might ask, so why was he there? To that I would say—and I did say to the police and the reporters—I don’t know. I might have asked him to come, but I didn’t remember. I remembered crawling out of bed to the sound of my brother’s blaring alarm. I remembered dozing in the passenger seat of his car. I remembered walking into homeroom and taking my spot smack in the middle of the room beside Liv. I remembered going to the band room and carving my name into my music stand and my brother pulling the gun out of his—my—backpack. But that was all. Everything after the shine of the light off the metal of the gun was a total blank.

Speaking of Liv, though. Speaking of Liv. Once upon a time Liv was my best friend. Best friends don’t break up the way boyfriends and girlfriends do. You can’t dump a best friend, or cheat on them. So once upon a time Liv and I knitted friendship bracelets and exchanged best-friend charms, each of us the proud owner of half a heart. Then struck a dark and stormy afternoon, and by last period there was a cool distance between us, a frisson of tension not unlike the fizz in the air before a lightning storm. But even so, the words automatically popped out whenever someone asked me about her: “Oh, yeah, she’s my best friend.”

Liv was, the coroners said, the second to die. Just as Evan was dropping to the floor, his head cracking against the windowsill and his blood beginning to soak into the carpet, my brother was already bounding up the risers. Some kids were beginning to scramble, or to scream, but not Liv. She was seated in the middle of the top row and hadn’t yet stood or thrown herself away—maybe she was frozen in fear. The bullet took her in the chest, and she tumbled backward, a music stand falling to cover the wound.

Or so the coroners had said.

Michael and I hadn’t spoken a word by the time we pulled into his driveway. He turned off the ignition and just sat there for a moment, letting the sensor go
ding, ding, ding.
I didn’t mind. I felt as if all my energy had slithered out the soles of my feet and melted into a lukewarm puddle on the floor, and that wasn’t even counting the throbbing in my forehead.

“So,” Michael said, “are we going to talk about what just happened?”

I rested my cheek against the taut strap of my seat belt. “My head hurts.”

Michael’s hands were still tapping the top of the steering wheel, and a vein was pulsing next to his eye. “Lucy,” he said, “we could have died. You tried to confront someone you said was too dangerous for my dad to meet. And my dad carries a gun.”

“I think you’re being a little bit dramatic.” Michael’s house, a charmingly compact split-level with glaringly red shutters, swam before me. I shut my eyes and melted into the black.

“Lucy. Lucy, are you okay?”

My eyes popped back open. His house had obediently returned to its proper position, even if it was a little bit hazy around the edges. “No. I mean, yes. It’s just a headache. I just need to sit down.”

He tastefully neglected to remind me that I was, indeed, sitting down, and then led me up his front stoop and into his kitchen, which was patterned almost entirely in red, white, and blue. His parents must be very patriotic, I thought as I sat down at the kitchen table.

“Here. Drink some water,” Michael said, handing me a glass.

I drank some water. “Thanks.”

He sat down beside me with a thump. To avoid his eyes, I lowered my head to the table and pressed my cheek against its cool surface. I fully expected him to start asking questions again, at which point I planned to start banging my head against the table until it exploded, but he didn’t say anything. I could hear him sipping water, the quiet glugging of it down his throat.

Finally, he spoke. “You remember the license plate, right?” he said. “You put it in your phone? I’ll have my dad look it up. Maybe it’ll help.”

I pulled out my phone and recited the numbers. He stepped into the other room to make the call. I propped my chin on my hands and listened hard. Words floated back through the entryway:
some creep following my friend; she’s seen him behind her car every day for, like, a week; she just wants to make sure he’s not a threat. No, Dad, I’m not going to go after him with a baseball bat; that was a onetime thing.
I cocked my head, and my interest grew. So he wasn’t just some pretty boy with a nice smile and a nice tan. He could lie with the best of them, aka me. And he had a violent side.

Maybe we would be good together.

Michael walked back in, tucking his phone in his pocket. “My dad’s going to look him up for us,” he said. “Don’t worry. In the meantime, you should eat something. I was going to teach you how to chop vegetables the right way, but you should probably just sit there. We can do that next time.”

I smiled at him as he took up his spot by the stove. “You shouldn’t even bother. I’d be terrible anyway,” I said. “I’m not good with knives. I’d be terrified of serving you a salad with bits of Lucy finger in it.”

“It’s not so bad once you’ve got the hang of it.” He grabbed an onion and mushrooms and reduced them to chunks in a blur.

“Now you’re just showing off.”

He flashed a cocky smile over his shoulder. “So what if I am?”

The vegetables hit the pan with garlic. The rich, earthy scent of them filled the kitchen, and my mouth watered. “What are you making?”

“I make a mean lasagna. So mean it tortures puppies and steals lollipops from little kids.”

“I love lasagna.”

He stirred the pan, and just as the scent grew fuller somehow, he dumped in a can of diced tomatoes.

“
Canned
tomatoes? Surely you jest.”

“Would you like to make the sauce?” Michael raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think so.”

I rested my head again on the table. The pain seemed to be getting better. To distract myself from the weight of my eyelids, I asked, “So you said you have sisters?”

“Three. I’m the youngest,” he said, giving the pan another stir. It smelled almost like pizza, and I had to lift my head to avoid drowning in a puddle of my own drool. “Alicia, Alianna, Aria, Michael. I’m the only one who didn’t get an
A
name. Just one of the many things that make me special.”

I rolled my eyes. “Are any of them at home?” Meaning would any of them want some of this lasagna? Because I was pretty sure I could eat the entire pan right now.

“No. Alianna and Aria are in college, Berkeley. Alicia lives in Manhattan and does something in advertising. Or fashion. Something like that.”

“How could you not know what your own sister does?” I always knew what my brother was doing.
Always.
I knew when he was sleeping; what class he was in; how long he’d be at swim practice; what movie theater he went to on his one and only date, when I’d begrudgingly made him go out with Liv to stop her whining about how cute he was and how he would never, ever notice someone like her.

He shrugged and tasted the sauce, then lowered the heat and topped the pan with a lid. “She’s thirty-two. By the time I was potty-trained, she’d pretty much moved out. She went to college at NYU and only came home for Christmas and a few weeks in the summer. She’s more like an aunt than a sister, honestly.”

My face felt stuffy with tears. “That’s so sad.”

As the cops escorted me out of my high school for the last time, I didn’t cry. I held my mother as she sobbed over my brother’s still form, and I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry when we left behind the only home I’d ever known.

And yet, right now, I felt as if I was going to cry.

Maybe my headache was giving me brain damage. Maybe it was a tumor after all.

I changed the subject. “So, swimming. How long have you been—”

Michael’s head jerked, and he pulled his phone out of his pocket. I could hear it buzzing; he propped it between his shoulder and his ear as he filled a large pot with water and then flurried it with salt. “Hey, Dad.”

I perked up. My teeth started to hurt, like I’d eaten too much sugar.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. No, not now. Okay. Wait one sec.” He grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper from the counter and scribbled something down. “I’ll let her know. Thanks. Bye.” He hung up, and when he turned around, his face was grave. “That license plate belongs to a Joseph Goodman, address 477 Gates Avenue, phone number 707-555-1299. Does that sound familiar?”

“No,” I said, my mind whirling. It could be an alias for Spence. If he was out here stalking me, he probably wouldn’t do it under his own name. He was smart. He was a doctor. Or the car could be stolen. Joseph Goodman might be some feeble old man, doddering, milky-eyed, oblivious to the missing car he never drove.

There was only one way to find out.

“Thanks for talking to your dad,” I said honestly.

“You’re welcome,” Michael said. “Do you want me to give this Goodman a call? Threaten him?”

I jerked my chin at the stove. “Your water’s boiling.”

He dropped sheets of pasta into the pot and turned back to me. “Do you?”

“No,” I said, oddly touched. He might have taken a baseball bat to somebody at some point, but a baseball bat couldn’t fix what was happening here. A baseball bat could shatter Lucy Black’s precarious existence, though. “Listen, it might just be a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t even him and I freaked out over nothing.”

He clamped his lips together and shook his head. “It didn’t seem like nothing, Lucy.”

“Can we just not talk about this for a little while?” My words were squeezed, as if I were forcing them through a clog in my throat. “I just need a few hours where I can not think about him.” I didn’t specify which “him” I meant: Spence or my brother. “Okay?”

He looked down into his boiling water, then at me, then at his pan of simmering tomatoes, then at me again, and then he did something entirely unexpected: he strode over to me, knelt before me like I was about to knight him or something, and wrapped his arms around me so that his face hit my shoulder. Not my chest, I noted. I wasn’t surprised. He was a good person. He deserved better than me.

Still, I leaned my head forward, rested my nose in his hair, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath as his curls tickled my nose. He smelled like chlorine, with a hint of garlic and onion, or maybe that was just the sauce finally beginning to come together.

I didn’t say anything, and neither did he—if we didn’t speak, neither of us could ruin this moment. No, that role was left to his father, who closed the front door with a slam and announced his presence with a couple of very emphatic throat clears. Michael and I jumped apart; my chair skidded back a full foot, and Michael just barely escaped slamming his head against the counter. The shock startled away my own headache.

“Evening,” his father said gruffly. He was still in his uniform, police hat firmly on his head, his chest shiny with multiple badges. “You’re Lucy? The one being followed?”

“That’s me.” I pasted a smile on my face. “But it’s okay. I’ll be okay.”

The look he gave me made me feel as if he could see through my skin, from the coils of my small intestine to the
glub-glub-glub
of my heart to the blood pumping toward my face. I felt worse than naked. “Well, you let me know if someone’s bothering you,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”