Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 9

That night as Mom and I ate dinner, I heard the snow plows finally make their way to our street. With the streets cleared, there would be no stopping the Emorys from returning home in the morning. I was dying to tell Trey about Violet's medical records and what Cheryl had told me about Tracy Hartford. I disappeared into my bedroom for an hour to talk on the phone with Mischa after dropping off Mrs. Waldbaum's medication across the street. Mischa had a brain that was an impressive repository for trivia and funny facts, but she hardly had the same powers of deduction as Trey. Trey could have been a top agent for the CIA or Foreign Legion, I was sure of it. He'd be able to draw insightful conclusions about all of this new information, but it just seemed to infuriate Mischa.

"Stupid Tracy Hartford. Serves her right for continuing to hang out with that girl even after Olivia and Candace died," she snapped. "I don't even feel sorry for her. I don't."

It had crossed my mind to tell Mischa about Trey's relationship to Violet, but I had to remind myself while on the phone with her that she was likely to overreact about pretty much anything. Telling her would serve no purpose, and she already wasn't Trey's biggest fan. I at least had to wait until Trey told me how he'd found out, himself. He still hadn't answered my original question having to do with why he'd gone to the Green Bay mall the day that Olivia was killed. Every time I started to relax and then thought about Trey again, I had a sour suspicion that there was a part of what he needed to tell me that I wasn't going to like.

"What about Milwaukee tomorrow, if the streets are cleared?" Mom asked hopefully as she loaded dishes into the dishwasher.

I hesitated before replying, thoughts rushing through my head frantically as I tried to determine the best way to respond. My mom seemed hell-bent on going to Milwaukee for a day of cultural fun while I was home for the break. There was no getting around that commitment without hurting her feelings, so I had to decide if it was more advantageous to get it over with now, or push it off until later in my visit. With so much work ahead of me in dealing with Violet, I felt like my life was too unpredictable to push things off until later dates. It was a possibility that if there was going to be aggravated trouble with Violet or with the law if, there wouldn't be later dates. As much as I really wanted to wait at home the next day for Trey's arrival, I thought it might be best to just give in to my mom's request and be done with the obligation.

"Sounds good," I said, trying to seem chipper. "But let me see how my foot feels in the morning."

All things related to Violet aside, I actually did have a great deal of homework to do while home for the break. I had found studying at Dearborn to be nearly impossible. The other girls in my study hall, held in the school's rather pitiful library, used the class period to snicker, tell jokes, braid hair, and point out other girls' traits worthy of ridicule. Studying in my room was equally frustrating because Alecia talked to herself, hummed, and sang constantly, sometimes even in her sleep. I was terrified of getting on her nerves even though I was sure that I was stronger than her and would be able to hold my own if she ever initiated a physical fight. Dearborn was just like prison in that little girls teamed up with networks of larger girls. The entire system functioned on relationships: who knew who, who owed who favors. My survival depended on my ability to stay out of that network.

So I'd given up on studying, which was kind of unnecessary anyway since all of the classes at Dearborn would have been considered remedial by Weeping Willow High School's standards. I was cruising through them without even trying very hard. The big problem with just coasting through my junior year was that unlike most of the other girls at Dearborn, I still had hopes to get into a decent college, and felt the need to keep up with my classmates back at Weeping Willow High. I still had my junior year text books at home from the classes I'd abandoned, and had told myself for the past six weeks that I'd use my break at home to catch up as best I could on lessons I'd missed.