I don’t see Johnny anywhere.
‘What the hell do you want?’ I shout, surprised at my sudden bravery. Ray’s eyes are beady, red, and cutting right through me. Dwight offers up a mean cackle. These boys are drunk and stupid. But more than that, they’re clearly aiming for a fight.
‘Well, look who it is,’ Ray says, laughing sharply. Almost like he’s bored. ‘The dumb bitch who’s chosen to help out some girl from River Oaks instead of standing up for her own kind.’
Diane keeps searching over her shoulder, looking for Johnny. She’s crying hard, her breath coming in sharp, short bursts. She’s panicking, I can tell.
‘You’re drunk, Ray Swanson,’ I say. I have to buy time, to stop them from whatever it is they want to do. ‘How’d you even know we were here?’
Butch laughs, and my body goes numb. I remember that sound on the way back from the Treadway house. The sound that I convinced myself was a cat.
‘You thought you were so sneaky,’ he spits out. ‘You thought you wouldn’t be followed.’
Diane manages to speak between shaky breaths. ‘You don’t understand,’ she says, trying to reason with this pack of boys. ‘I love Johnny. I never wanted him to take the fall for something I did. It’s why I confessed!’
I take this moment to slip down the back steps and move closer to Diane. For the first time, I wish I had a blade on me.
Ray yelps in amusement at Diane’s words. ‘You love Johnny! That’s a bunch of bull. You wouldn’t look at a boy like that twice on the street.’
‘He got his ass beat by the fuzz because of something you did,’ Dwight adds. ‘You let him rot in the cooler for a week.’
Ray advances, followed by the rest of them.
These boys are ready to do anything.
I turn, frantic, my eyes searching our dark neighborhood streets for Johnny, for anyone to help us. I want to cry out.
What happens next happens so fast. The sort of fast that even in this moment I know I’ll never be able to remember in full detail. Only in flashes. Only in awful splotches of color and squeals of sound.
Diane is running, blindly. The boys are moving, angry. Like a wave they rush toward Telephone Road, where the bright headlights of traffic pulse past us.
‘Leave me alone!’ Diane screams, running without thinking.
‘Diane, Diane, stop!’ I shout.
A honking horn.
A pack of boys.
A gentle, auburn-haired girl whose only crime was believing in love.
The next thing I know, there’s a sound so terrifically loud and horrible – a screech of brakes, a sick thud.
Diane is there on the blacktop, a broken body in the yellow glare of the headlights.
Shouts and screams. A man’s voice cursing. The sound of a car door slamming.
Blood rushes into my ears. Everything swims in front of me. Bile kicks up inside my mouth, and I puke, right there in the street.
The last thing I remember seeing as I sink into blissful darkness is Johnny Treadway, running up to us, pushing past the crowd, dropping to his knees by his Diane.
He screams so loud in agony I think he might die, too, and take the rest of us with him.
A sheet of white fabric stretches out in front of my immediate vision. If I focus, I can see the small, neat stitches in it. There’s a metal rail. A hint of disinfectant in the air that reminds me of the city pool in summertime. Bleach.
I’m in a bed somewhere I don’t recognize. Whispered voices hover over me, punctuated by the sound of quick footsteps on tile.
I roll from my side onto my back, and my mother rises up into my line of sight like a sunrise. She reaches out to touch my cheek, the feel of her cool, gentle fingers as familiar as my own face. Even though it’s been years since I’ve let her comfort me like this.
‘Where am I?’ I ask. The dry, thready sound of my own voice frightens me.
‘The hospital,’ she whispers. ‘You fainted, and you hit your head. But you’re going to be fine.’
I blink once. Twice. And then the entire memory of how I ended up in the hospital floods over me like a sudden fever.
The boys. The car. The figure of a girl in the headlights.
‘Diane?’ I ask. Because I have to know.
The beat before she opens her mouth to answer is all I need to understand the truth.
‘Evelyn,’ my mother says at last, her own voice cracking.
I shake my head, wince at the pain, and close my eyes.
‘I don’t want to think about anything,’ I manage, and it’s like my body understands, because I drift off into an inky, dreamless sleep.
I’m not in the hospital for long. Everything happens to me there. I don’t have to think or make decisions. I open my mouth for the thermometer and for the watery hospital applesauce and to say no or yes to easy questions from the doctors. ‘Are you feeling any new pain in your head?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can you sleep?’ ‘Yes.’
All of it’s easy, and I find myself thinking I wouldn’t mind staying here forever, not having to think or do. When they roll me out in a wheelchair two days later, the Houston sun makes me squint, and suddenly everything feels real again.
Painfully, awfully real.
Back home Mama and Grandma have fresh sheets on my bed, and someone – probably Grandma – has cleaned and organized my bedroom until I can barely recognize it. Everything is all straight lines and neat, tidy stacks. My Raggedy Ann doll has been moved to my bed, just like back when I was a little girl. As soon as I get home from the hospital, I change into a white cotton nightgown and crawl under the covers, and I bury my nose in Ann’s head, breathing in the musty red yarn. My heart swells with gratitude toward Grandma even as my brain has to adjust to the walls of my bedroom. Cheryl’s side is as lonely and empty as ever, and I wonder briefly what she knows, but I can’t bring myself to ask about that yet.
I keep waking up from sleep thinking I’m back in the abandoned house on Monroe, until my foggy, groggy brain catches up.
Once I call out for Diane until Mama comes in to check on me, and as my mind clears, I realize where I am. I don’t cry, though. I just stop calling out and stare out my bedroom window at our tiny backyard.
I don’t want to think about Diane.
I don’t want to think about anything.
Mama and Grandma hover around me, bringing me trays of food and encouraging me to eat. I try, but everything is absent of taste. I force myself to take exactly three bites of everything to keep them happy. They don’t ask me about anything that’s happened to me. They don’t bring up the awful events of my last night in the house before I ran off with Diane. Every question is about something superficial. Is it too cold? Is it too hot? Am I hungry? Am I sleepy? Every comment is about something unimportant. It’s going to rain today. The Carters got a new Chevrolet. I can’t remember where I put my coat.
Even though the doctors at the hospital said I could get back to ‘a normal routine’, Mama and Grandma almost seem happy to have me tucked away in bed, easy to find and keep track of. Several days pass and I don’t go to school, I don’t do chores, I don’t do anything. And I like it fine, too. It’s almost like the hospital. I can just be a body, numb and quiet. The most I venture anywhere is out to the den, where I watch television nonstop, not laughing at anything funny and not crying at anything sad. Just watching. From Get the Message to Search for Tomorrow to The Match Game, I let the buzzy, fuzzy images wash over me. White noise. Once I stay up so late Mama finds me watching the test pattern, staring at it like it’s any other television program.