Her eyes widen. “I don’t think—”
“Get out. Please.”
“Harper—”
“Just go, okay?”
Once she’s left the room, shutting the door hard behind her, I lie down on my side. I hate Aunt Helen. I hate her stupid your-sister’s-in-a-better-place crap. Like she could somehow know that. The anger bubbles up again, white-hot, and I lash out one closed fist and punch the wall. It doesn’t make me feel any better, just hurts the hell out of my knuckles. My eyes burn like maybe I’m going to cry, but no tears come. Dammit.
Neither Aunt Helen nor Mom bother me for the rest of the night; I don’t know if I should be upset about that or not. Instead of thinking about that, or my weird, inexplicable inability to cry, I choose to focus on the CD and what it might mean.
So June liked classic rock. It should be an inconsequential detail. It’s not like it matters. But part of me feels like if I listen hard enough, I’ll decode some secret message, put together the pieces of a puzzle that will shed light on some aspect of my sister’s life I have no insight into. If I was in the dark about something as simple as her musical taste, what else was she hiding?
Examining that thought keeps me up all night. After hours of obsessing over it, I finally crack. I set the disc player aside and reach for my cell phone on the nightstand. Even in the dark, I can punch in Laney’s number by memory. It rings about six times before she picks up.
“Hrrrmph?” I figure that’s her version of hello at this hour.
“It’s me.” My voice comes out just above a whisper, too tight, and I don’t know why my heart is beating so fast.
“Harper?” she says. There’s a pause and the rustle of bed sheets. “What’s wrong?”
Of course she would think something is wrong. Nobody ever calls in the middle of the night with good news.
“Nothing,” I assure her hastily. “Nothing’s wrong. I … Sorry, were you sleeping?”
“It’s two in the morning. What do you think?” She yawns, and I can hear her shifting around like she’s settling back against the pillows. “So what’s up? You’re sure everything’s okay?”
I tell her about finding June’s CD, how it had been playing in the car when I found her, how I know the handwriting on the disc isn’t June’s, and it isn’t Tyler’s, either. Laney goes quiet for a long time, and I start to wonder if she’s fallen asleep somewhere in the midst of my rambling when she speaks.
“What does it say on the CD?” she asks.
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” I recite it from memory. “I think it’s Latin or something.”
“Huh.”
“You ever heard of it?”
“I don’t think so. But that’s what the internet is for, right?” I can practically hear her grinning on the other end of the line. “I’ll come over tomorrow after school—we need to talk about how the hell we’re going to pull off this California thing anyway, so we can look into it then. Unless you want me to come over right now.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, I don’t have to, but I will. If you need me to. Just give me five minutes—”
If I know Laney at all, the muffled noises I’m hearing are probably the sound of her getting dressed and grabbing her car keys. That’s the kind of person she is.
I quickly say, “No. Don’t. If you fail your exams due to sleep deprivation, your parents will never forgive me. It can wait.”
I don’t have to worry about exams this year. Two days after June and the garage and the pills, an emergency phone conference was conducted between my parents, the superintendent, the principal, the assistant principal and the guidance counselor, who all came to the conclusion that it would be best for all involved to allow me to skip the remainder of the school year and leave my grades as is.
As far as silver linings go, this one is really inadequate.
It turns out I was right: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum is, in fact, Latin.
“Well, not exactly,” Laney corrects me. “I guess it’s, like, bastardized Latin? Kind of like a joke. It translates roughly to ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”
I raise my eyebrows. “All this from the internet?”
“Google is so my bitch.”
We’re in June’s room, on Laney’s insistence that there might be more clues to the identity of the mastermind behind the mix CD. She drapes herself across June’s bed, hanging off the edge upside down, her long wavy hair dangling to the floor. I feel sort of weird about her making herself comfortable on my dead sister’s furniture, but it’s not like everything can stay perfectly preserved in here forever.
I open one of June’s desk drawers and ask, “How were your exams?”
“Precalc can just fuck right off,” she moans, flinging an arm over her eyes.
“It went that bad, huh?” I wince sympathetically, then shoot her a sideways look. “So, um. What’s it like?”
“What’s what like? Precalculus?”
“No. You know. School.”
School is a subject neither of us has broached. Mostly I haven’t even bothered to consider the situation at Grand Lake High since everything went down, but now a sort of morbid curiosity gnaws at me. Laney pulls herself back onto the bed, sits with her knees under her and her hands in her lap, hiding behind a shroud of blond hair.
“It’s … really weird.” She clears her throat and glances at me nervously. “There was this assembly, for the whole school. All these girls crying who didn’t even know her. I swear I wanted to kick them in the face. Oh, and they postponed graduation by a week. The guidance counselors made everyone quote, unquote ‘close to the situation’ have, like, an hour-long debriefing on our feelings. The administration is totally freaked out.”
“Really?”
“I think they’re afraid it’s contagious, and one day they’ll walk in and find the whole school drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid or something,” she says. She studies me carefully for a moment. “Are you okay? Like, generally speaking? I feel a little weird talking to you about this.”
I look away and shrug. “You shouldn’t. I wanted to know.”
“Yeah, but …” Laney looks ready to say more, but she just sighs again and lets it drop, much to my relief.
I open the next drawer, pawing through the mess of papers there. It’s more of the same—old homework assignments, class notes, a flimsy old binder project now falling apart. Nothing of importance. I wonder what my mother is going to want to do with all of this stuff. Throw it away? Or keep the room intact out of sentimentality, like some kind of shrine dedicated to June’s memory?
Okay, that would be totally creepy.
“Hey,” says Laney. She’s leaning over and digging stuff out from under the bed. “I think I found something.”
She resurfaces with a brown paper bag in hand. I sit on the bed next to her as she dumps its contents out onto the bedspread. Two CD cases tumble out. The first case cover has a painting of a man with a cigarette in his mouth, standing in the night under a neon sign, a woman in a fancy dress to the side gazing straight at him. The second cover has a man’s head in black-and-white, overlapped by a series of squares and diamonds and circles, the lettering done in a light blue.
“Tom Waits,” Laney reads off of the first