Forget You(2)
Author: Jennifer Echols

A TINY CHIP HAD APPEARED IN the pink polish at the tip of my pointer fingernail, where it was most noticeable. I rubbed the pad of my thumb across it, hoping no one would see it before I could fix it. My mom had always stressed to me that outward appearances were important. Strong personalities would challenge you no matter what, but you could repel the weaker people who might take a swipe at you by presenting yourself as moneyed, stylish, organized, together.

From across the emergency room waiting area, I heard a familiar voice, though muffled–a voice from school. I looked up from my fingernail. Doug Fox stood in the vestibule, framed by the black night outside.

Doug was hot, with black hair that never streaked in the chlorine and salt and sun, and eyes the strangest light green-blue, exactly the color of the ocean here. They were mesmerizing, framed by long black lashes in his tanned face. I could see why his eyes were famous among the girls at my high school. A boy with an ego as big as Doug’s didn’t deserve eyes like that.

I had a lot of classes with him this year. He was on the varsity swim team with me. And he hated me. He was the last person I wanted to see right now, when the doctors had told me my mom would live, but I didn’t know what would happen next.

Instinctively I ducked my head–which would do me no good if he looked in my direction. My hair wouldn’t drape forward to cover my face. It was still pulled back in the ponytail I’d worn home from work a few hours ago, when I’d walked into the eerily quiet apartment I shared with my mom and found her. Anyway, Doug and I had known each other forever. He would recognize me instantly. My hair in my face would not save me.

But he wasn’t looking at me. He talked with the policeman who’d responded first to my 911 call, who’d stood awkwardly in the apartment while I sat on my mom’s bed and held my mom’s hand until the ambulance came, and who had not abandoned me. My dad had been half an hour away in Destin, shopping the Labor Day sales for baby furniture with Ashley. He’d arrived only fifteen minutes ago and had burst through the hospital doors in front of me, into mysterious corridors that were off-limits to a minor like me. All this time, the policeman had sat with me in the empty waiting room. Or, not with me, but across from me. Not close enough to converse with me or comfort me like a friend, but in the vicinity like a protector. Around.

Now he stood in the vestibule with Doug. Doug handed him a bag printed with the name of a local seafood restaurant: Jamaica Joe’s. And I realized in a rush that the policeman was Doug’s older brother, Officer Fox, equally celebrated by the girls in my school for his appropriate name. Doug had brought his brother dinner because his brother had stayed with me long enough to miss a meal.

They spoke with their heads together, and now Doug did look up at me. His brother was telling him what my mom had done.

I looked away again. The doors into the emergency room were white. The walls of the waiting area were white. The floor was square white tiles with gray specks.

I couldn’t stand it. I looked over at the vestibule. The night was black, Officer Fox was dark in his uniform, and Doug shook his black hair out of his green eyes, piercing even at this distance. He said something to his brother and took a step toward me.

Oh God, weren’t things bad enough without Doug here? I’d thought the shock of finding my mom had drained the life out of me for years to come. But my heart still worked, pounding painfully in my chest in anticipation of what Doug would say to make things worse.

The emergency room doors flew open and banged against the walls before folding shut again. My dad stalked toward me, muscular and fit at forty- seven, his handsome features set in fury. I shrank back into the vinyl seat, afraid he was angry at me.

But maybe he was furious at the world for allowing his ex-wife to sink to this low–or better yet, furious with himself. He had realized on the drive here from the baby superstore that he had failed us. Now he would come to our rescue. Y there was the matter of Ashley being four months’ pregnant with

es, his baby, but our family would get past that and he would come back to my mom.

He lowered himself into the seat next to mine. His brow was furrowed in anger, but as he opened his thin lips, I was sure he would utter everything I’d longed all summer to hear.

"Y keep this to yourself," he snarled.

I blinked at him. My brain rushed through scenarios, painting him as the hero, and finally gave up. There was no way he could be our hero when his first words to me were a command to keep things quiet. I stammered, "Keep . . . How . . . ?"

"They’re taking her to the loony bin in Fort Walton," he interrupted me. "With any luck they’ll dope her up, and she’ll be back at work in six weeks. Y ou want to spread it around town that she’s nuts and ruin her career, go right ahead."

I tried to hear pain in his voice, sorrow at what my mom had done, remorse for the hand he’d had in driving her to this point. Emotions like these must be behind his unsympathetic words.

But all I heard was anger. Embarrassment that his friends and business partners and employees might dish about him and his tabloid-worthy private life. Fear that my mom would lose her job and he’d have to share the proceeds of his water park with two families instead of one.

"Don’t even tell those little twins, you understand me?" He leaned forward and looked straight into my eyes as he said this. It was the closest his body had come to my body since he arrived. He would not hug me. He would only invade my personal space to emphasize that I’d better not spill this secret to my best friends.

Without waiting for my answer, he stood. "Don’t move," he barked, not looking at me. I assumed he meant me because I was the only other person in the room. He was already walking toward the vestibule.

Oh God, oh God. He might threaten Officer Fox into promising silence, but he had no idea who Doug was, or how little Doug cared about anybody. There was no threat my dad could make to Doug that would shut Doug up if he thought spreading the news about my mother would hurt me. Doug would think he was ruining my life, but really he would be ruining my mother’s–because even if she started to recover from her mental illness, she wouldn’t recover much if she lost her job and the community’s respect.

I saw all this unfolding in front of me as my dad swung open the glass door to the vestibule and leaned into Officer Fox’s personal space, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it from happening. Doug’s green eyes widened as my dad growled at Officer Fox. I couldn’t make out all of what my dad was saying, but when you can kiss your job good-bye floated to me through the glass, I turned away from the black rectangle of night. I stared at the white doors to the emergency room. My thumb found the chip in my fingernail polish and rubbed back and forth across it. I didn’t need to see it to know it was there.