You know what question I asked the others on one of those first few days? And no, not “What’s your favorite color?” or “What’s your favorite animal?” It bugs me when people think that just because I’m “only thirteen,” I’m still a little kid who shouldn’t think about anything deeper than rainbows and fluffy animals.
Anyway… The question I asked them was: “What did you do the night before Infernal Friday?”
I was curious. That night, we lived out the last few hours of life as we knew it. I wanted to know what people had done with those hours, besides sleep. Most of their answers were kind of lame, which made me sad. If they had known the world was going to hell the next day, they probably would have done something different.
When they turned the question back to me, I felt good about what I’d done. I’d spent the night the way an almost-thirteen-year-old girl should spend it, hanging out with her friends. But if I’d known it was going to be the last time I ever saw them alive, would I have done something different? Yeah, I guess I would have. I would have made it last.
Even so, I’ll never forget that night. Or the day after…
Friday, April 13, 2012
8:00 a.m.
A bleary-eyed Gabby heaved her haphazardly-rolled sleeping bag and duffel into the hatchback of her mother’s Ford Escape. “Bye, Gabs!” Makayla yelled from the front stoop, where she was standing, barefoot, in her pajamas. “See ya tomorrow!”
“See ya!” Gabby called back, waving briefly before she disappeared around to the passenger side. She heard the screen door bang shut as Makayla went back inside.
“Tired?” Jo asked as she climbed into the SUV beside her.
Gabby nodded, and a yawn came to punctuate her wordless reply.
“Did you have a good time?”
“Yeah,” said Gabby. Feeling she should return the question – and to keep her mom from probing further – she added, “How was your shift?”
“Oh, fairly typical.” Her mother gave a low chuckle. Gabby smiled, a little uncomfortably, and was relieved when Jo didn’t elaborate.
She had once looked forward to hearing her mom’s stories from the Emergency Room, even begged her for the really freaky, gory ones. But not anymore. These days, she preferred not to think too much about what her mother did for a living. When she went to work at the hospital, Jo spent her twelve-hour shifts caring for people just like she and Gabby had been that night, scared and hurt and bleeding. Gabby didn’t know how she could stand it. She had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up, but she knew it wouldn’t be a nurse. No way, José.
“Did I buy you those PJs?” Jo asked suddenly, her hand ready to shift into reverse, but her eyes focused elsewhere. Confused, Gabby followed them down to the magenta, leopard-print, cotton pajama shorts she had on.
“Oh… no. They’re Mak’s.”
“Oh! I was going to say…” Jo trailed off, apparently deciding not to say whatever she had intended to. Probably that she thought purple leopard spots looked tacky, or trashy, or something to that effect. “So, why are you wearing Makayla’s PJs?”
Gabby pictured her own pajama pants, wadded into a wet ball and sealed inside a Ziploc bag at the bottom of her duffel bag. She chose her words carefully. “Oh… mine got wet, so she let me borrow some. I spilled soda,” she added quickly, before her mother could ask any more questions.
“Oh dear. I hope you cleaned up,” Jo remarked, finally shifting. Gabby buckled her seat belt and didn’t reply, as the car backed slowly down the driveway.
She looked out the window, watching the houses of Makayla’s neighborhood flash by as Jo drove. They got smaller the closer they got to home. Finally, they were pulling into the driveway of the only house Gabby had ever known. She’d just turned two when her parents had bought it in 2001, just months before the terrorist attacks on September 11 had thrown the economy into a recession that had only gotten worse in the decade since. She didn’t remember the apartment they’d lived in before; the major milestones in her memory, from riding her first bike in a wobbly circle around the driveway (her dad had taken off her training wheels, then gotten her off to a running start), to starting her first period in the same bathroom in which she’d been potty-trained (her mom had dealt with those), had taken place in this house.
The asphalt driveway was cracked and in need of patching now. Gabby stepped carefully over pot holes as she lugged her sleepover gear into the house. That, too, needed repairs. When he’d been alive, her father had overseen the home improvement projects. Now the maintenance of their house fell squarely on her mother’s shoulders. And Jo was tired.
Gabby could see it in her mother’s posture as she shuffled into the house, shoulders slumped. She could see it in the lines in her face, the dullness in her eyes as she looked around the kitchen, her gaze lingering on the bills piled on the table, the dirty dishes piled in the sink. Gabby could hear it in the way she sighed, but said nothing. Jo didn’t have the energy to complain. Gabby knew her mother was as tired, probably more tired, than she was, having worked all night at the hospital, but it was more than that. She knew that, too.
Jo disappeared into the master bedroom to change out of her scrubs, and Gabby dropped off her stuff in her own room.
“I’m gonna lie down, babe!” she heard her mother call after a few minutes. “It would be nice if you could pick up some for your party tomorrow!”
“’Kay!” Gabby called back. She closed the door to her room and started unpacking her bag. Normally, she wasn’t so prompt about putting things away, but she was hosting her own sleepover for Makayla and her other friends the following night, and she wanted her room to look neat. Maybe she’d be better at keeping it that way as a teenager than she had been as a child. Tomorrow was her thirteenth birthday.
She put away her iPod and her toiletries, tossed her dirty clothes in her laundry hamper, and fished the Ziploc bag with her pajama shorts out of the bottom of her duffel bag. She opened it up carefully, wrinkling her nose as she caught a whiff of the fishy smell of the Gulf. The shorts were still damp, but had dried some, and were now crusted with salt. She decided she’d do her own laundry today, so that she could wash them before her mother got to them. Jo would wonder what she had been doing playing in the ocean in her pajamas, and Gabby didn’t want to be grilled.
She dumped the clothes into the washing machine and added a capful of detergent. Her mother would kill her if she knew she and Makayla had snuck out of the house in the middle of the night… and she’d be beyond dead if Jo found out they’d gone down to the marina with a couple of boys. Smirking to herself, Gabby closed the washer lid and cranked the dial to the normal cycle. She heard the rush of water as the machine began to fill.
Last night, it had been tapping. Tapping on Makayla’s window, just after midnight. Whether Makayla had planned it or not, she wouldn’t say, but when she had pulled up the blinds, there had been two grinning faces pressed against the glass. Makayla hadn’t seem too shocked, but Gabby’s heart had leapt into her throat until she’d recognized them as Brock and Colton, two boys from her seventh-grade class. Colton was okay; he was on the student council (she’d voted for him) and had earned the nickname “President” in fourth grade, when he’d had the habit of standing up to answer questions and adjusting his hoodie before he spoke, the way men in business suits straighten their jackets. He was polite to everyone and had a good sense of humor. Brock, on the other hand, was a big kid with a big mouth, loud and obnoxious and immature, despite the fact that, physically, he was the tallest boy in their grade. Maybe it was the physical aspect which gave him some appeal, in Makayla’s eyes.
She had opened the window to the two of them, and Brock, who lived somewhere down the same street, had held up a portable DVD player. “Wanna watch Friday the 13th with us?” he’d asked, as casually as if he knocked on Makayla’s window to invite her to a movie every night.
Makayla had looked at Gabby, and Gabby had stared back pointedly, trying to convey with her eyes that she didn’t want to at all, without actually saying it in front of the boys. But Makayla had either missed the message or ignored it, and Gabby had soon found herself standing awkwardly outside in the dewy grass, in nothing but her pajamas, with a couple of boys she’d never even talked to outside of school before.
The boys had come over on bikes with the portable DVD player, a six-pack of Mountain Dew, and the plan to ride to the marina, where Brock’s family had a boat. They’d sneak aboard and watch the movie there. Again, Gabby had been reluctant, but Makayla must have thought Brock was making a grand romantic gesture by suggesting it, and so, Gabby had been carted to the marina on the handlebars of Colton’s ten-speed.
Her butt was still sore from riding that way, she realized, patting it gingerly as she moved from the tiny laundry room into the kitchen. There she fixed herself a bowl of cereal, carefully avoiding the invisible spot where her father had been killed as she put the milk back into the fridge.
She carried her cereal into the living room and set it down on the coffee table as she settled onto the couch and turned on the TV. Last night, she had sat on the deck of Brock’s boat with her back pressed up against one of the seats, gathered with the others around the tiny screen of the DVD player. It hadn’t been very comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to watch the movie anyway. She didn’t do well with slasher flicks these days. After the second bloody murder, she’d had enough and had snuck away from the group with the excuse of having to use the bathroom. She’d ended up picking her way down to the beach, where she’d found a dry spot in the sand to sit.
It was Colton, not Makayla, who had finally come to check on her and found her there, hugging her knees to her chest in the cool night breeze. “You okay?” he’d asked earnestly. His voice had not yet broken, and it rose to a high pitch with concern that seemed genuine.
She had smiled and nodded. “I just don’t like scary movies very much,” she’d admitted, once he’d plopped down beside her.
Colton had surprised her by smiling, a nervous chuckle escaping his lips. “I don’t really either,” he’d confessed. “This was Brock’s idea. ‘Cause it’s a Friday the thirteenth and all.”
“So, does he like Makayla or something?”
Colton laughed nervously again. “I don’t think I’m supposed to say…”
Gabby raised her eyebrows. “That sounds like a yes.”
Even in the moonlight, she could see Colton blush. He blushed easily in class, his fair, freckled skin turning redder than his hair, and though it was dark, she saw the same effect there on the beach. It made her smile.
“Don’t worry; I won’t tell,” she added. And she hadn’t told, not that night or in the morning, although that wasn’t a guarantee she never would. She thought Makayla had a right to know if a boy had a crush on her. Wasn’t she, herself, at least a little curious to know what Colton thought of her now? After last night…
“Wanna take a walk?” he had asked after awhile, standing up and brushing the sand from his backside. He’d offered her his hand to help her up, and as she’d reached up to take it, she had marveled over the contrast of his pale, white arm, glowing almost blue in the moonlight, next to her own, darker skin.
They’d wandered a ways down the bay, the tide lapping at their bare feet, until the lights of the marina faded, and it had grown darker. It was then that Gabby had tripped and sat down hard in the water, soaking her pajama bottoms. She’d been mortified at first, but Colton stuttering and stumbling to help her had made her laugh, and he had joined in, and before she’d known it, he’d pulled her to her feet, she’d staggered into him, and, then, somehow, his lips were pressed up against hers, clumsily kissing her.
The kiss had been wet, and he’d tasted like Mountain Dew and nacho cheese Doritos, but now, as she absently spooned cereal into her mouth, Gabby savored the memory of it, though with fascination more than any real fondness.
It had been her first kiss.
She hadn’t seen it coming, and apparently, Colton hadn’t put any real thought into it either. The moments afterward were just as awkward as the ones that had led up to it, with him blushing and stammering and nervously giggling again. She’d been so astonished, she hadn’t known what to say or how else to feel. Even now, she was not sure. Did she like Colton? She hadn’t before, not like that, at least. He was just a boy from school, a nice boy, but not one she’d ever given much thought. She didn’t like-like any of the boys at school, anyway. But did he like her? She could admit it to herself now: she was curious.
Gabby smiled over her cereal as she perched on the couch, like a mother hen carefully guarding her own, private secret. She hadn’t even told Makayla that Colton had kissed her, but maybe she would, tomorrow night, at her party. She would think about it. She did think about it, as the TV droned on in the background.
When she snapped out of her sleepy reverie, her cereal bowl empty, Gabby realized she’d never even flipped channels. The TV was still tuned to NBC from when her mother had watched the nightly news before work yesterday. The Today show was on now. Uninterested, Gabby picked up the remote to change it, but not before catching the end of Ann Curry’s recap of the morning’s top stories.
“… And in breaking news, we are getting reports of unauthorized, foreign jets seen flying in the Washington, D.C. area around six o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, this morning. The jets were captured on video by a civilian recording on his cell phone, and we have that video for you now.” There was a pause, as the feed cut to a shaky, pixilated clip of a small group of planes flying seemingly low to the ground. Watching, the remote still in her hand, Gabby recognized the Washington Monument in the background.
“As you see on your screen, the jets circled the Washington Mall several times before flying over the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. Officials at the Pentagon and nearby Bolling Air Force Base are on a heightened security alert, and the Department of Homeland Security has raised the National Threat Advisory from yellow to orange, while they are investigating the aircraft sightings. We at NBC will update you on this story when we can confirm more details. Reporting live from the news desk this morning, this is Ann Curry.”
The news held her attention for another minute, before, shrugging it off, Gabby set down her cereal bowl and changed the channel.
