Marianna Baer - Frost

“I guess,” Viv said, not sounding convinced. “I was keeping it a secret, but I got us tickets to Letterman tomorrow.”

“Really? God, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well, I am, too.”

Sitting in the car, I couldn’t get Viv’s voice out of my mind. And we’d only moved about five feet in the last ten minutes.

“What is wrong?” I yelled, hitting the steering wheel. “It’s a Sunday. Who are all these stupid people?”

“Hey.” David laid a hand on my knee. “We’ll get there.”

He had been much calmer than me after we’d found out Celeste was definitely back in the dorm. Even though we were still confused about why she’d left, and why she wasn’t answering our calls, he kept saying, “I know it’s a pain in the ass, but at least she’s safe.”

I refrained from telling him that with everyone so mad at me, I didn’t care if she was safe at school or the victim of an alien abduction. Actually, I did care. I’d have preferred the alien option.

I fiddled with the radio, trying to find a traffic report. “By the time we get there, I’ll have to interrupt Dean Shepherd during her party.”

“She’s the one who told you to come talk to her. She can’t be pissed if you do.”

Bad song, worse song, commercial … “Do you think I should call Viv again?”

“I think you should try to relax.”

“You keep saying that!” I snapped off the radio and glared at him. “Do you have any idea how much this sucks?”

“I know it sucks,” he said. “I just don’t think getting upset does any good.”

“How can I not be upset?” I said. “This is a really, really shitty situation your sister’s put me in. Put us in. I mean, I know it was stupid of me to tel Dean Shepherd about Viv’s parents, but I shouldn’t have even been talking to her. If Celeste hadn’t run away—”

“Leena—”

“And I don’t even know why the dean wants to see me tonight! Maybe Celeste made it sound like we did those things to her. Like we broke her vase and ruined her art project.” I couldn’t say it to David, but maybe she’d even told the dean about the nests spelling out GO , about how someone wanted her to leave. Maybe she’d blamed everything on Abby.

“Why would she do that?” David said.

“I don’t know.” I gripped the steering wheel and focused my eyes on the Greyhound bus ahead of us. “Because Celeste always wants to be the center of attention, right? And that’s exactly what happened in the dorm. And what happened this weekend! Maybe she even did it all herself—the vase, the nests. So she can be the victim, just like she wants.” Blood pounded in my ears.

“Yeah,” David said. “That occurred to me.”

“What?” I turned. He met my eyes with complete calm.

“I was worried, at first,” he said, “that she might have broken the vase herself.”

Any words in my mouth evaporated. He’d been thinking the same thing I had? “Oh,” I said eventually. “Well, did you … did you ask her about it?”

“I didn’t have to.”

“What do you mean?” I glanced forward, drove a few yards to close the gap that had opened up. Looked back at David.

“I didn’t have to ask,” he said. “Celeste told me. Not that she did it. That she didn’t . She’s not stupid. She knew I’d suspect her.”

“Oh.” This was all such a surprise. “And you believe her?”

“Yeah, I do.” He pointed at the windshield. “Bad accident.”

Up ahead, the left of four lanes was closed to bypass a mess of police cars and ambulances. David and I fell silent as we inched up to the scene. Three totaled cars sat at varying angles on the median.

“They’re using the jaws of life,” I said. “Someone must still be in that car.”

“Uh-huh,” David said. Then his hand covered my eyes, knocking into my glasses. “Oh, man. Don’t look.”

“David! I’m driving.” I batted his arm.

“Well, keep your eyes straight ahead. Trust me.”

I did, but couldn’t help asking, “What is it? A body?”

“You don’t want something horrible to be the thing you remember from this weekend, do you?” he said.

“As opposed to remembering my own personal disasters?” I said. “God, we’re at a total standstill again.”

“Hey. Look at me for a sec.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about this mess,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry for my sister’s part in it. I am. But about what you said before—Celeste is not always the center of attention. At least not the center of my attention. Understand?”

I nodded.

“And this might turn out to have been a pretty important weekend,” he said. “So you should work on remembering the good parts.”

“Important?”

“No?” he said. “Nothing that happened strikes you as important? Nothing’s changed?” His gaze lingered on my lips.

I glanced at the road, looked back at David. “Maybe you should refresh my memory.”

He moved his hand to the back of my head and eased me forward into a long, soft kiss. This time, instead of adding to my worries, the heat and intensity obliterated them. In that moment I knew, despite any self-sabotaging nervousness, this was what I wanted.

THROUGH THE WINDOWS of Dean Shepherd’s cozy, shingle-style house, I could see people gathered in her living room—standing in clusters, eating, drinking, laughing…. I ran my fingers through my hair, tucked it behind my ears, and rang the bell.

The dean answered the door holding a glass of red wine. “Leena,” she said. “I was beginning to worry about you.”

I wanted to tell her how nice she looked in her silk, kimono-style dress. I wanted to tell her David and I had finally gotten together. I wanted to be one of the people invited to the party, not the student interrupting it.

We had to pass through the living room to get to her home office. The smell of onions and garlic cooking poured from the kitchen. The Cinnabon I’d eaten for dinner sat like a brick in my stomach. I said hello to Mrs. Fleissner, an English teacher, and Mr. Prince, a theater teacher, self-conscious about my too-long-in-a-car appearance. I didn’t know the other guests by name, but I could feel everyone looking at me with curiosity. Had the happenings in Frost House been fodder for their party conversation? Hard to say, since I didn’t even know what the happenings were.

Dean Shepherd shut the office door behind us. Stacks of paper filled every surface. She took a messy pile off a chair and asked me to sit, then placed her glass of wine on a bookshelf, as if she’d be too tempted to down it during our conversation.

“So,” she said, sitting. “Have you been back to the dorm yet?”

Was that a trick question? “No.” I said. “Well, I dropped David off there to see his sister. But I didn’t go in. You told me to come straight here.”

She folded her hands together on the desk. “I know I was vague on the phone. I didn’t want to get into it until I saw you in person.”

“It sounded serious.”

“When I went to look for Celeste, the dorm was a wreck.”

“A wreck?”

“Your section of the house. It looked like a tornado had hit it. Clothes everywhere. Boxes in the middle of the hallway.”

“Did someone break in?” I asked, suddenly a bit panicked. I’d left my laptop there, my only valuable jewelry—

“No,” the dean said. “Celeste did it. She was moving all of her stuff into the tiny room with your desks, and your stuff into the room with the windows.”

“She was what?”

“Moving your things, so you’ll have separate rooms.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. “That’s weird. We’ve never talked about doing that. She did all of this on crutches?”