Brandy Colbert - Pointe

I did the same thing yesterday. All day. I told my parents I was studying for a big chemistry test, but instead I spent hours up in my room, covertly nursing a weak stomach and mind-numbing headache as I scoured the same articles about Donovan and Chris, trying to see if I had missed something.

Chris. Yes, Chris. I’m not going to call him Trent anymore. I’m not going to call him someone he never was.

Nothing has come out about the suspect besides his name. Maybe Chris didn’t take Donovan. There could have been a misunderstanding. Maybe the lawyers and reporters and police officers were confused when they found them, jumped to conclusions because the waitress who called them was so frantic after she recognized Donovan. Maybe Donovan agreed to go with him. They used to be friends. Friends.

Unless there was something going on with them the whole time and I was too stupid to see it. Did Chris make me his secret so he and Donovan could keep an even bigger one?

Mom always says the most effective way to take your mind off something is to stay busy, so I convince myself that this sick, sick feeling will go away once I start getting ready and drive to school and get on with my day.

Except I puke in the shower. My stomach is knotted with shame. I’m not safe from thoughts of him, even standing in the steam with needles of water pricking my skin. It’s as if he’s here in this room, as if Chris Fenner can somehow see me standing here naked. No matter how hard I scrub, I still feel his fingers on me. In me.

I take too long in the shower and then too long deciding what I can choke down for breakfast without getting sick again, so by the time I pull into the student parking lot I’m already late for homeroom. It’s not that big of a deal; homeroom isn’t a real class. But now I’ll have to stop by the office to get a late pass and that always takes forever and if I had somewhere to go I would pull right out of this lot and not look back.

I close my eyes as I think about getting out of my car and walking into school. I remind myself that only two other people in the entire world know about this; one of them is certainly not telling and the other one isn’t talking at all.

Unless he does.

So I whip out my cell phone and before I can really think about it, I’m calling Donovan’s house.

The phone rings. And rings. And with each one, my palms sweat more, slipping around the phone as I pray for someone to pick up. At first, I wish for Donovan, think maybe he’ll see that it’s me calling, recognize my number after all these years. But soon I’m desperate for anyone to pick up, even if it’s Mrs. Pratt, even if she uses her defeated voice, the one we all heard in press conferences and interviews after Donovan had been gone too long to hope.

No one answers. Not Donovan, not Mrs. Pratt, not a voicemail telling me my call will be returned. I know they must be ignoring everyone—he’s only been back three full days—but for some reason I thought Donovan might come to the phone if he saw it was me. Talk to me, because he must know I’m freaking out.

I remember the first time Chris pulled me into the bathroom of the convenience store for a quickie. He was working and it was risky, but the store was still empty when we came out. Except for Donovan, who was staring very hard at the comics on the shelf before him, like he wanted to be anywhere but there. When he looked at me, his eyes rested on the waistband of my skirt and I looked down, too, horrified to see it all bunched and misshapen around my middle. He looked away quickly but I felt the burn of his stare until I buried the skirt deep in the bottom of the hamper that night.

But he’s not talking. He won’t tell.

It takes five minutes to roll up the window and step out of my car. I spend the next ten hanging out in the science-wing bathroom before I stop in for my late pass.

And after that, I watch the clock in my classrooms for the rest of the morning, and 210 minutes later, my stomach has still not stopped turning over.

* * *

You can tell everything you need to know about a school if you poke your head into the cafeteria at noon on a Monday. Like which friends are fighting and who got too wasted over the weekend and who smoked a joint before lunch. It’s no place to be invisible.

The chicken in the hot-lunch line is dry and I can’t bring myself to walk over to the salad bar, so I grab a Diet Coke and a package of trail mix at the register. My hand holding the trail mix feels light and I squeeze it around the package, determined to not look down at the calories printed on the back.

Phil stares as I sit down across from him. “She lives,” he says around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

“I know I look like shit.” My hair is back in a wispy ponytail, my eyes tired and red and puffy from my weekend of crying and insomnia and trying to keep my food down. I’m wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt I found on the floor, and a pair of bright red flats that don’t match my outfit in the slightest.

“You don’t look like shit,” Sara-Kate says quickly, glancing at Phil. “We were just wondering if you were okay. We both called and texted but—”

“I know.” I scoot my round plastic chair closer to the table, look down at the sophomores at the other end to see if they’re watching us. They’re not. “I mean, I saw.”

I’m lying because once again I don’t remember even looking at my phone this weekend. The first time I’ve really paid attention to it in the last two days was this morning, when I called Donovan.

“Trisha was talking this morning,” Phil says. And his eyes move down to the table, like he’s not sure whether to share this with me. I look at Sara-Kate to see if she already knows, but her face is neutral. “Her dad said if that piece of shit pleads not guilty, this trial could get huge coverage. Especially if Donovan still isn’t talking when it starts.”

“Yeah, because Mr. Dove is the expert on these kinds of cases?” My fingers skate across the top of my Diet Coke can until I force them to sit still while I open it with my other hand. “He’s a divorce attorney.”

“He’s still a lawyer. He might know what he’s talking about.” Phil shrugs, his neck sinking into the collar of his plaid button-down. Red and black and white, rolled up to his elbows, like a skinny brown lumberjack. “And dude, if he pleads not guilty, you could help put a total scumbag in prison.”

Sara-Kate looks at Phil, then tilts her head to the side, her big eyes blinking rapidly, as if she’d never thought about the possibility of a trial.

“I don’t know what happened that day better than anyone else.” My eyes flick to the salad bar, where people are lined up, dropping chunks of browning iceberg lettuce into their bowls. I clear my throat, try to sound normal as I say, “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“It’s kind of a big deal. You were one of the last people to see him. My mom—”

He stops but I look at him, curious what Mrs. Muñoz had to say this time. “Your mom what?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head, presses his lips together.

I frown at him, tap the edge of his tray with my soda can. “What did she say, Phil?”

My tone must be harder than I realize. Sara-Kate’s eyebrows go up as she swirls a french fry through a pool of ketchup on her plate.

He pauses again before he speaks. Not Phil’s style. “She said she was glad she never let me go to that store with you guys, because it was cursed.”

I brush a hand over my messy hair, wish I could brush one over my face and wipe away the bags under my eyes. “Cursed?”

Phil looks sorry he said anything at all. “You know how she is. She practically lives on superstitions. Did I ever tell you about the time she swore some lady gave me mal de ojo in the grocery store?”

Sara-Kate and I both stare at him.

“The evil eye,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s when a stranger looks at your baby the wrong way and shit starts getting out of hand. So every time I cried a lot or had a fever or whatever, she would think it was because of a woman we passed in the dairy aisle.”

“That is the weirdest and best thing I’ve heard all day,” Sara-Kate says in wonderment. She looks really cute in a pair of fitted gray suede pants and a vintage crocheted white sweater with a red tank underneath, and it makes me feel even frumpier than I already do.

And for a moment, I wonder—if it were just the two of us, would I tell her about me and Chris? What would she think about me after I confessed something like that? What would everyone think?

My life would never be the same if I put everything out there for the world to talk about. The paparazzi would show up at my house, harass my family. There would be no more parties at Klein’s because no one invites girls like me after they learn the truth. My reputation would be ruined. My life would be over: ballet, friends, all of it.

No, I think, as Sara-Kate grills Phil about mal de ojo. I can’t say anything before I talk to Donovan. The truth is so close, and I know he’ll talk to me eventually, I just have to keep trying.

The fact that we’re no longer talking about the trial seems like a small victory, so I decide to try the trail mix. I tear open the plastic bag and pop a raisin in my mouth. A raisin that is too juicy, too sweet on my tongue, but I chew and swallow so I will look like everyone else in this room.

Phil scoops up the last bite of his mashed potatoes and I’m kind of amazed. Lunch started less than five minutes ago, so that must be some kind of record. Especially for something that looks as lumpy as those potatoes. He chews and swallows and points his fork at the patch of table in front of me.

“Is that seriously your lunch?”

“My stomach’s off.” I stare at the stack of thin black bracelets around his wrist. “I think I caught a bug.”

Phil makes a face at me. “I don’t see how eating like a woodland creature can help. Isn’t it starve a cold, feed a fever?”

“Not even, Philip,” Sara-Kate says, flashing him a smile that is equal parts sweet and defiant. “It’s starve a fever, feed a cold.”

“I don’t think either of them are true,” I say. A little too loudly. One of the sophomores at the end of the table actually looks over. “And I don’t have a fever or a cold. Maybe I just don’t feel well.”

“Then you should be eating soup or bread or—”

“Back off, Phil.” The frost around the edges surprises even me and I get a flash of déjà vu.

So does Phil. His face tells me so.

He looks at me for a very long time, so long that I know what he’s thinking. I know exactly what he wants to say to me, exactly what he thinks I need to hear. But I’m not interested. If Phil won’t stop obsessing over my old food issues, how would he react to my news about Chris? I trust Phil, I do, but not with this. Not until I know more, until I know the facts and it’s not simply speculation.

Phil stabs his fork into a brick of chicken, begins sawing away at it with a butter knife. “Okay, Theo. Whatever you say.”

He and Sara-Kate discuss our options for Halloween and Phil sounds normal enough, but he doesn’t look at me for the rest of lunch and I wonder if we are the friends everyone can tell are fighting.

THE ASHLAND HILLS HIGH SCHOOL FALL FESTIVAL IS A NECESSARY evil.

It’s not mandatory to participate, but it’s easy extra credit and as long as you don’t get stuck manning a super-lame booth, like the pumpkin ring toss, it’s somewhat bearable.

The festival is held on the athletic field and is basically a giant clusterfuck of students and parents and young siblings nobody wants to be seen with. Student council organizes the whole thing, so I have an in. Bryn Davenport is the junior class president and being on her good side means I get to work the popcorn stand. Sara-Kate is working the face-painting stand and Phil is, unhappily, manning the football throw booth with Joey Thompson. Sports are not on Phil’s radar—he thinks they’re either barbaric or nonsensical—and he’s been grumbling all week about the troglodytic nature of a football toss. (“I mean, why not have the guys choose a girl to club over the head as their prize? Pathetic,” he scoffed when we got our assignments.)

But when I walk into the little brick concessions building at the edge of the field to start my hour-long shift, I think Bryn Davenport must hate me, because she’s paired me with Klein Anderson.