Trial by Fire Read online

  “Mess?” Miranda said, focusing her rage on him. “You think I’m a mess?” she repeated, her tone sliding up an octave.

  The bell rang, breaking up the knot of bystanders, but Miranda didn’t move. She waited, eyes bright with furious tears, for Tristan to deal with her.

  “Go,” Tristan repeated to Lily. “I got this.”

  Lily turned and went to her class. Behind her, she could hear the two of them arguing. The volume rose steadily until Lily could catch the last retort from all the way down the hall.

  “Whatever, Miranda,” Tristan said. “I honestly don’t care about what you think.” Then Lily—and half the student body—heard Miranda slap Tristan across the face.

  Lily ducked into her classroom rather than go back and defend Tristan as she might have a few days ago. This wasn’t the first time a girl had slapped her best friend, but it was the first time Lily believed he’d really deserved it.

  After school, Lily felt a bit strange getting a ride home from Tristan as she usually did. Having no other option, she waited in the parking lot by his car and grimaced when she saw the hassled look on his face as he came toward to her.

  “I could have my mom…” Lily began halfheartedly.

  “Your mom? Driving? Like I want innocent blood on my hands,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “She’d never make it out of the driveway, anyways,” Lily said dryly. “The garage confuses her.”

  Tristan unlocked the doors on the Chevy Volt that he kept immaculate for Lily, and they both got in.

  “Sorry about today,” he said sincerely. “I didn’t mean to drag you into it.”

  “That was some slap. How’s your face?”

  He sighed dramatically. “Unfortunately, the nurse said that slap was loaded with cooties.”

  Lily sucked in a pained breath. “Cooties. You know what that means?”

  “They’ll have to amputate.”

  “Girls across the tri-state area will be inconsolable. A national day of mourning is sure to follow.”

  He smiled at her lazily, his mouth inches away, eyes locked with hers. Lily desperately wanted to forget the whole thing and kiss his cootie-infested face, but something held her back.

  “How’s Miranda?” Lily asked, looking down at her hands.

  “How should I know?” Tristan turned back to the steering wheel and started the car. His coldness toward Miranda disturbed her. Was this how Tristan treated every girl he was finished with?

  “Do you want me to talk to her?” Lily offered. “I can tell her it was unexpected. That she’s got the wrong idea about us and what happened.”

  “Miranda has so many wrong ideas in her head I don’t see how setting her straight about one of them will make any difference. She’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, Lily.” Tristan glanced at the look on Lily’s face while he drove out of the parking lot and knew what she was thinking. “I know, I know,” he said with exasperation. “If I think she’s an idiot, I probably shouldn’t have fooled around with her in the first place, right?”

  “She’s a lot younger than us, Tristan. Two years is a big deal,” Lily objected gently.

  “I guess.” He sighed. “But trust me, Lily. Miranda’s not some innocent little girl. I didn’t, you know, ruin her or anything.”

  “Ruin her? What century is this?” Lily chuckled. Tristan’s lips turned up in a tiny smile. Lily took a second to steel herself for the next question. “Were you still involved with Miranda the other night?”

  He rolled his eyes. “She wasn’t my girlfriend. I never made any promises to her, and it was idiotic of her to think we were going to be a couple.”

  They drove in silence for a bit.

  “Just out of curiosity, how would a girl know if you were going to be a couple?” Lily was reaching—fishing for a commitment from him like she was one of his desperate admirers. She disliked herself for it, and as the silence stretched out, her question hanging like a bad smell in the air, she started to dislike him for not answering her. They pulled into Lily’s driveway, Tristan’s face never even twitching to show that he’d registered what she’d said.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven for the party,” he said, then drove off.

  Lily stood outside in the cold sea air after Tristan left. She liked the cold. She especially liked the clean, salty air that blew in off the Atlantic Ocean, which was pounding away at the rocky shore just a few blocks from her house. Cold, damp air cleared her head and soothed her skin. Luckily for Lily, growing up in Salem meant that there had always been plenty of blustery winds off the water.

  When she was comfortable and cool, Lily turned and went inside the ancient Colonial house that had been in her family since the Pilgrims had landed. Literally. Lily’s parents, Samantha and James Proctor, could trace their families back to the Mayflower, and both of them had family members who had either lived in Salem or the surrounding Essex County since there was such a thing as an Essex County on this continent. Sometimes Lily wondered if her raging allergies were from inbreeding, but her sister told her that was ridiculous. Tristan’s family, the Coreys, had been in Salem just as long as the Proctors had, and there was certainly nothing inbred about Tristan.

  Lily put her stuff down on the kitchen table and listened to the house for a moment. “Mom?” she called, when she decided it sounded empty.

  “Is that you, Lillian?” Only Samantha, Lily’s mom, called her by her full name.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Where are you?” Lily wandered toward her mother’s voice, confused. It sounded like she was out in the garage.

  “Ah, Mom. Look at this mess,” Lily exclaimed when she saw what her mother was up to out there.

  Samantha sat at her old potter’s wheel, her curly red hair sticking out wildly, throwing clay in her pajamas and robe. She was in the spot where Lily’s dad parked his car, but she hadn’t put a tarp down underneath her. The floor was covered in drippings that were already beginning to harden. They’d have to be chipped off, but that was only half the problem. In the parking spot next to that, her mom’s old Jeep Grand Cherokee was splattered with clay. Lily dug her hands into her hair, surveying the disaster.

  “There she is—no bumps or bruises! I almost came to get you at school,” Samantha said in chipper way. She only garbled her words a little, and that concerned Lily. The meds made her slur, and the slightly clearer speech could mean that she hadn’t taken all of them today. “But when I didn’t get the phone call from your principal, I knew that my Lillian wasn’t the one that trashy girl had attacked in the hallway. See? That’s how I knew the difference between what happened here and what happened elsewhere.”

  Lily tried and failed to work out her mom’s logic.

  “And then I saw my wheel!” Samantha continued happily. “And I wondered, why did I ever stop throwing pots?”

  Lily looked at the watered-down lump of poorly mixed clay in her mother’s shaky hands and couldn’t think of a way to say the phrase you lost your mind and the meds destroyed your talent so it didn’t sound cruel.

  It hadn’t escaped Lily’s notice that before she’d gone to Spanish, Miranda had looked like she’d wanted to attack her but had settled for Tristan instead. Yet, according to her mother, the fight had happened. Elsewhere. The new medication obviously wasn’t strong enough. If her mother was underdosed, things could get ugly. She’d need help.

  “Hey, Mom? Aren’t you cold?” she asked brightly. Samantha nodded, like it had just occurred to her that she was. “Why don’t you go inside, and I’ll finish up out here for you.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Samantha said placidly. She slid out of her dirty Crocs and took off her ruined robe, handing it to Lily.

  “I’m going to take you upstairs, tuck you in, and then make a few phone calls, okay?” Lily said carefully. When her mom got confused like this Lily knew the best way to keep her calm was to be as clear as possible.

  “Yes, call your sister and tell her exactly what happened,” Samantha said. Her face s
uddenly got serious and she grasped Lily’s hands with her clay-covered ones. “There isn’t a Juliet who doesn’t love you,” she said desperately. “Remember that.”

  “Sure, Mom,” Lily said, smiling brightly as she pried her fingers free. “Let’s get cleaned up, okay?”

  Samantha nodded and shuffled inside. Lily pulled out her cell phone and called her dad, just in case he decided to answer. When she was shunted to voicemail after two rings, Lily didn’t even bother to leave a message. He was obviously avoiding the call and probably wouldn’t check his inbox for hours. She speed-dialed her big sister, Juliet, instead.

  “What’s wrong?” came Juliet’s immediate response.

  “Mom’s having a bad day,” Lily said, not at all surprised that her sister already knew something was out of place. The two sisters often joked that their phones were so used to making emergency calls that they had somehow learned how to ring more urgently when there was trouble. Lily walked over to the refrigerator and checked her mom’s meds.

  “Did she get loose again?” Juliet asked.

  “No,” Lily replied thankfully as she counted her mom’s pills. “She just decided to make a few pots. But she neglected to take the car out of the garage first.”

  “Fantastic.” Juliet paused. She and Lily started laughing at the same time. “How bad is it?”

  “Oh, it’s pretty impressive, Jules.” Lily finished counting the pills. “I just checked, and she took all her meds today, so we’ll have to talk to the doctors about her dosage again. I can clean up the mess myself, but I’m worried about leaving her alone tonight. And I have this thing.”

  “A date?” Juliet practically screamed with excitement.

  “Sort of.” Lily felt her cheeks heat with a blush. “Tristan’s taking me to a party.”

  “A party.” Juliet sighed heavily. “Lily, are you sure about that? With all the hair products and perfume that the girls will be wearing, and the alcohol and smoke?”

  “Can you come or not?” Lily asked quietly. “It would mean a lot to me.”

  Juliet paused. “We’ll talk about the party when I get there,” she said, and ended the call.

  Lily decided to start on the Jeep first. Her dad’s spot could wait. It wasn’t like he’d be coming home that night anyway.

  Technically, Lily’s parents weren’t divorced, but her father had pretty much abandoned the family about the time her mother started wandering around sleepy Salem, screaming at everyone to shut up. James had hung in there for a few years. Lily was in eighth grade when her allergy symptoms started escalating exponentially and, as luck would have it, at around the same time Samantha began accosting people at the grocery store. She’d started walking right up to people, telling them she knew about the affair they were having, the bankruptcy they were hiding, or the Adderall they were stealing from their kids to lose weight.

  Sometimes she was right, and sometimes she wasn’t. When she was wrong, she simply said that another “version” of the person she’d accused had done what she’d said. Samantha caused a lot of trouble for some good people, but she’d downright humiliated anyone with the last name Proctor. In a small community like Salem, having a crazy mother was not something that was easily overlooked. By the time Juliet went to college two years ago, it seemed like all of Salem had turned on the Proctor family and wanted to run them out of town.

  That’s when James stopped coming home most nights. He couldn’t take the embarrassment of being married to the town kook, but he knew that if he filed for divorce he’d end up getting burdened with Lily. No court would grant Samantha custody of a minor with as many medical problems as Lily had, and James didn’t like sickness, either mental or physical. He didn’t file for divorce or involve the legal system in any way because he knew he would end up with more responsibility. Instead, he just stopped showing up.

  Lily filled a bucket with soap and water and opened the garage door so she could let out the fumes of the cleaning goop while she scrubbed. Even the non-toxic stuff her mom bought at Whole Foods still irritated Lily if she was around it in its undiluted form for too long. Ten minutes later, her eyes were watering from the chemicals so badly she could barely see. She ignored them. She had a party to go to, damn it, and after everything that had already happened that day, a couple of leaky eyes weren’t about to stop her. Another twenty minutes later, she was mostly done with the Jeep, when she heard Juliet’s car pull into the driveway and park.

  “You know what? The way the clay’s all flung out like that, it almost looks festive,” her sister said from the garage door.

  “I’ll be your best friend if you check on Mom,” Lily said, wiping her hair off her damp forehead.

  “Fever?” Juliet crossed the garage to Lily. Her giant brown eyes were rounded with concern. Lily edged away from her sister’s smooth, cool hands before Juliet could touch her face.

  “Just warm from all this exercise,” Lily said.

  Juliet cocked her chin as she judged Lily’s health. The gesture accentuated the heart shape of her face, and as she pursed her naturally red lips with worry, Lily thought, as she always did, that Juliet’s mouth looked like a heart inside a heart—a small red one inside a larger, pale one. Lily knew most people considered her sister a bit plain. Juliet dressed conservatively and never wore makeup or styled her straight, mousy-brown hair. But to Lily that stuff was irrelevant. She thought her sister was the prettiest girl she’d ever seen.

  “Check on Mom. I’m awesome.” Lily turned Juliet by the shoulders and gave her a playful kick on the rump to get her to go inside.

  When Lily finished, she found her sister sitting in bed with their mom, taking her pulse. At twenty, Juliet was already a registered EMT and moonlighted at a hospital to pay her way through Boston University. Sometimes it seemed like everyone closest to Lily had decided at an early age that it would be a good idea to go into medicine—probably because at some point they’d seen paramedics fighting to keep Lily breathing. That kind of experience tends to leave a lasting impression on a kid.

  “How is she?” Lily whispered when her sister looked up. Juliet tilted her head to the side in a noncommittal gesture before easing herself off the bed and taking Lily out to the hall.

  “Her pulse is racing. Which is kind of hard to do when you have two hundred milligrams of Thorazine and an Ambien in you.”

  “Is she alright alone?”

  “She’s fine for now,” Juliet whispered, her big eyes downcast.

  “Did she say what’s bothering her?” Lily asked. She took Juliet’s arm and led her down the hall to her room.

  “She’s paranoid.” Juliet sighed as she sat on Lily’s bed. “She said another Lillian was planning on taking her Lillian.”

  “That’s—” Lily stopped, overwhelmed.

  “—the way she explains her hallucinations to herself,” Juliet finished for her. “The hallucinations aren’t wrong if they really happen somewhere. She isn’t crazy if there are multiple versions of people and multiple worlds that only she knows about.”

  “Yeah.” Lily agreed reluctantly. Something about this explanation bothered her. She knew her mom made stuff up, but how had she known about Miranda nearly starting a fight with her in the hallway? It hadn’t happened, but it almost had. It certainly could have happened if one or two things had worked out differently. “But it’s spooky how close to true her lies sound sometimes.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “And it keeps getting weirder.”

  “Schizophrenia is a degenerative disease.”

  Juliet said things like that sometimes. It wasn’t to edify Lily, who already knew the ins and outs of their mom’s condition. It was to remind herself that no matter how much of a nightmare all of this seemed, it was still considered normal in some textbook somewhere. Feigning normalcy didn’t help Lily much. Cracking a joke usually did, though.

  “Ah, schizophrenia. The gift that keeps on giving.”

  Neither of them laughed, but they both smiled sad
ly and nodded in unison. It helped to have someone to nod with. That’s how Lily and Juliet survived. A textbook answer, a bad joke, and a sister to lean on, and so far they’d managed to keep their dysfunctional little family from going completely down the drain.

  “So what’s all this about a party?” Juliet asked.

  Lily sat down next to her sister. “It’s the only one I’ve been invited to since junior prom. Which I missed because I got sick,” Lily said quietly. Juliet wanted to interrupt. Lily took her hand and kept going before her sister could argue. “Look, I know what’s happening to me. I know that soon I won’t be able to go to school anymore. I’m out of time, Jules. And it’s okay. Well, no, it isn’t okay, but I’ve accepted it at least. I just want to go to one high school party before I’m stuck inside a plastic bubble for the rest of my life.”

  “So. Tristan’s taking you,” Juliet began cautiously.

  “Yeah.” Lily looked down, smiling softly. “And I’m pretty sure we’re going as a couple.”

  “But he doesn’t care if you don’t go to parties. You know that.”

  “I also know how long I waited for this. How long I waited for him. I can’t miss this party, Jules.”

  Juliet tilted her head to the side and rested it on Lily’s shoulder. They sat together for a while, comforted just to be close to each other.

  “Want me to blow out your hair?” Juliet asked after a long silence. She sat up and looked Lily in the eye, smiling.

  “Would you?” Lily jumped off the bed and pulled her sister up with her, as if the melancholy exchange they’d just had was miles away already. “I can never get the back.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Three and a half hours later, Lily had luxurious, bouncy, Hollywood-starlet hair. She even managed to get some all-natural, nonirritating makeup on her face and a slinky dress on her bean-pole body without getting too overheated. The dress wasn’t fancy, but it did compliment her slender build and tricky coloring. Lily didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard, but she still wanted to look good.

  “You and Tristan are easing into the whole relationship thing, right? Taking it slow?” Juliet asked a little too casually.