Todd Strasser - Wish You Were Dead

The door opened and Ms. Skelling came in, followed by Maura. Our faculty advisor was wearing a full-length shearling with the kind of stitching that had been fashionable in the 1970s or 1980s, and I wondered if it was something she’d kept from her heydays along the Philadelphia Main Line.

“Are we all set for tonight?” she asked while Maura removed her ski jacket.

“I’m taking Tyler’s place on the desk,” Dave announced. “The driving teams are Maura and Courtney and the lesbians from Mars.”

Ms. Skelling frowned. “Keep it to yourself, Dave. Anyone know what’s on tap?” She gazed at me as she asked.

“There’s supposed to be a kegger in the woods beside the baseball field across from Tony’s nursery,” I said.

The door swung open again and Sharon and Laurie came in. Sharon was wearing her permanent scowl, which only seemed to increase when she saw Dave on the desk.

“Hi, girls, we’re just discussing the plan for tonight,” Ms. Skelling told them. “So far we know there’ll be a kegger in the woods across from the nursery.”

“Jocks,” Sharon instantly concluded as she pulled her hoodie over her head. “Well, looks like we’ll be busy.”

Laurie slumped into a chair without taking off her brown peacoat. Her silent ambiguity always struck me as eerie and unsettling. You had to wonder what was behind that blank look.

“Is there anything else going on that we should know about?” Ms. Skelling asked. She had not taken off her coat and I had the feeling she was eager to get everything settled for the evening so that she could leave. Did she have a date waiting somewhere?

“I heard there’s a party at some sophomore’s house in the heights,” said Laurie.

“Oh, dear,” Ms. Skelling said with a touch of resignation in her voice. “We all know what that means. Make sure you have buckets in your cars.” She turned to Dave. “The log?”

“Right.” Dave pulled open the desk drawer and took out the ring binder where we recorded every call, and the details of each “run” the driving teams did throughout the evening.

Ms. Skelling checked her watch, then looked at me. “We’re sure Courtney’s coming?”

“She always has to be fashionably late,” Sharon sniped.

“She’ll be here,” I said, even though Courtney and I still weren’t speaking.

“All right,” Ms. Skelling said. “Have a safe evening. And let’s make absolutely sure every client is safely inside their destination before we leave them.”

She left, but the echo of her final words remained as a not-too-subtle reminder of my recent failure to follow the rules. The Safe Rides office grew uncomfortably quiet for a moment.

“I don’t get it.” Dave finally broke the silence. “A party and a kegger after what happened last weekend? I would have thought people wouldn’t be in the partying mood.”

“Aw, look at Mr. Sensitive,” Sharon said snidely.

“I think you’ve got it backward,” Dave shot back. “You’d have to be totally insensitive not to feel that way.”

“You think those unenlightened testosterone-addled Neanderthals care about anything except themselves?” Sharon said. “Boy, are you in the dark.”

Dave glanced at me and I tried to give him a look that said, Don’t take it seriously. It’s just Sharon being Sharon .

“I saw that,” Sharon snapped. “God, you’re all so smug. So righteous. You make me sick.”

Suddenly I hoped there’d be lots of parties that night. Anything to get Sharon out of the Safe Rides office and into her car.

This had been the worst week of Adam Pinter’s life. He’d finally gotten up the guts to end his relationship with Lucy. He knew she wouldn’t take it well, but who could have anticipated this? Lucy gone? Inexplicably vanished? Adam couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow responsible. The fight they’d had the night she’d disappeared had been the worst ever. He knew about her condition and the medications she took. But could he really imagine that Lucy would do herself in over him? No, it was inconceivable—condition or no condition. He had never met anyone as grimly determined to succeed. Whatever the prize was, Lucy always had her eyes on it and nothing else. No one knew that better than he. After all, that was what he was to her, just another prize.

But that didn’t make him feel any less guilty. If only he’d followed his instincts from the start. Even though Lucy was beautiful and had a killer body, she’d always come across as too serious and determined. Being that he himself was pretty serious and determined, he’d almost always been attracted to girls who just liked to have a good time and not sweat all the serious stuff. So when Lucy had first turned her serious determination on him, he’d known instinctively that the two of them would be a bad match.

And yet, in the beginning there’d been another side to Lucy, playful and sexy and alluring. She was a girl who knew how to get what she wanted, and he’d gradually given in to her subtle but steadfast attention. There was something seductive about feeling wanted, and Lucy had made sure he felt that way.

Until it started to change. It almost seemed that the more confident Lucy was that she had him, the less she thought she needed to try. For the past six months, Adam had felt trapped. The playful, sexy Lucy had morphed into someone he’d privately nicknamed “Mother Lucy,” someone who seemed to have their whole life together planned out, only it wasn’t necessarily the life he wanted. He understood that part of the problem stemmed from her condition. She couldn’t deal with uncertainty. Because dilemmas and ambiguity could easily tip her into depression, she always needed to feel certain and definite. And once he’d been made aware of her condition, he’d felt obligated to do everything he could to help her feel stable and secure.

But gradually, her condition began to overshadow everything they did. More and more he felt like it was his job to make sure she was happy and secure. And strangely, the more obligated he felt, the less happy he was. He was a teenager, for God’s sake, and yet sometimes he felt like he was facing a lifetime of taking care of an incredibly hardworking and demanding invalid.

Besides, someone else had entered the picture. Someone interesting and exotic. Someone fun and undemanding who always seemed thankful when he could sneak away to be with her. She was like an oasis, far from the stresses and pressures of his life—the polar opposite of Lucy.

So last weekend at the party, he thought hinting that he was set on going to Harvard might be a good first step. A way of gradually breaking the news to Lucy that it was time for their paths to diverge. But Lucy was too smart. She’d seen right through him. Or maybe it was her realization that there was someone else. Either way, there was nothing gradual about her reaction.

Adam felt a visceral pain born of guilt. All week he’d felt horrible. Had hardly been able to eat or sleep. What if he really had tipped her over the edge? Caused her to do something impulsive and rash, or even worse, calculated and vindictive? It was exactly the sort of thing bipolar sufferers were apt to do, and how else could you explain what had happened? Vanishing without a trace. “No sign of foul play,” the cops repeated over and over again. Although Adam suspected that the words were just cop talk for “We don’t know squat.”

Even the private detective the Cunninghams had hired was coming up blank. He’d met with Adam twice to go over the events of last Saturday night and had prodded him over and over to try and recall anything Lucy might have said to indicate that she was thinking about running away … or worse.