Out of Order

Chapter 2

Chapter 2June 27th

I crouched on top of the broken toilet, breath held tight inside my chest. My heart was beating a mile a minute, a sickening, too-loud tattoo against my breastbone that I was sure would give me away. Pulse pounding in my ears, the adrenaline kicking in too late—far too late—I waited, not breathing.

It was prom night. The four of us had gone stag—or is it called doe when it’s a group of girls? We’d had the debate, put it to a vote, and decided stag sounded cooler. We went to prom as four hot single ladies. Jessa’s boyfriend Brandon had dealt with this decision gracefully and stuck by us the whole night, despite not being her official date. He and his best friend took turns dancing with all four of us, taking group pictures, being complete gentlemen. Everything was supposed to be perfect—had been perfect—until ten minutes ago.

It was after one o’clock by the time we got to the diner. We asked our limousine driver to drop us off at Sparky’s 24-Hour Diner, just off the highway. Despite being older than our parents, Sparky’s address wasn’t in the GPS; we had to give the driver directions. We’d known the place since we were little kids, and we were all starving. I was salivating at the prospect of pancakes with real maple syrup. Not that table syrup that was just liquid sugar, but real maple syrup, thick and amber.

Our prepaid time with the limo was up, so we sent him on his way without fanfare. Jessa tipped him through the app. We could walk to Ricky’s house from Sparky’s—we would spend the night at her place like we had a hundred times before. The party was over; we just wanted a quick bite to eat and a warm bed to crash in.

Sparky’s looked the same as ever: slightly run down, with old but well-scrubbed checkered linoleum floors and cherry-red vinyl booths that squeaked. It looked like every twenty-four-hour diner in every movie, and for good reason. This was the kind of place someone driving through town would stop. There was a place out back for truckers to park all night.

The place was empty when we got there. A boy I vaguely recognized as having graduated the year before us was working the night shift all by himself when we toppled through the door. He was cute, a fact I would have recognized even if Ricky hadn’t “subtly” nodded her head in his direction—to make sure I noticed, I suppose. I was perpetually single, and she was always trying to set me up.

He’d been leaning on the counter reading a magazine but straightened to attention when the bell above the door jingled. He had one of those country-boy faces, tanned and freckled and round, and a bowl cut his mom had probably done over the kitchen sink. It suited him. Or, he made it work, at least. Like he’d walked straight out of a Boy’s Life ad for fishing tackle and thrown on a red Sparky’s apron.

I flirted with him out of peer pressure. Kate shot me a s**t-eating grin when his back was turned, and I returned it meekly while secretly brushing our fingers together under the table. I could see the blush creeping up her neck as she opened her hand to accept the invitation. It sent a thrill running through me.

The whole thing was a bit of a joke between us. She knew it and I knew it. Jessa and Ricky didn’t. They egged me on while he seated us in a booth and brought us our drinks, making kissy-face and waggling their eyebrows while I held Kate’s hand under the table.

His name was Jake; it was on his nametag. I remember thinking that it was probably his dad’s name. Just about everyone in this town was a Junior. If Jessa’s giggles were any indication, he was making eyes at me, too. But when you looked like me in a town where everyone looked like him—well, it could just have been that, too. I pretended it was flirty. And maybe it was.

Go to prom, dance your heart out, make out in the coatroom, drop off the boys, take a limo to Sparky’s, pretend to flirt with a cute diner employee for free soda refills—the whole night was a perfect cliché. Maybe it was too perfect. Maybe I should have known it was all too good to be true. I should have knocked on wood or…something. Anything.

“I have to pee,” I’d announced to the table after Jake had disappeared into the kitchen to get our food. We’d all ordered pancakes with various toppings—assorted fruit for Jessa, just butter for Ricky, blueberry sauce and icing sugar for Kate, and maple syrup for me. I’d been holding my bladder for about an hour and wanted to empty it before the food came.

“Go ahead,” Kate laughed, pointing to the neon bathroom sign in the corner as if I needed reminding where it was. “It’s all yours.”

“Come with me?” I asked Ricky, raising my eyebrows at her hopefully. Girls always go to the bathroom in groups. It’s an unspoken rule.

(A rule we broke. The beginning of the end.)

“You need help holding your skirt up?” Ricky asked, her cheeks still flushed from dancing. Robert, the sixth contributor to our limo, had danced with her the most out of any of us. I remembered how tightly he’d held her to his chest, his parted lips and sparkling white teeth flashing in the spotlights on the dance floor. I had no doubt that they would be getting together after prom. They would make a cute couple, far better than her last disaster of a relationship.

“No,” I sighed, scooting out of the booth by myself. “I’ll be right back.”

I scurried to the bathroom, their joyous laughter following me until the big, metal door swung shut. The sounds of them were cut off abruptly, silence filling the small ladies’ room. One of the stalls was out of order. It had been out of order for as long as we’d been coming here.

I made a makeshift toilet seat cover out of cheap one-ply toilet paper before I sat down, layering it carefully so that my butt would never touch plastic. I don’t like public bathrooms; I can’t help but imagine a slimy layer of bacteria covering every surface whenever I am forced to use one. Holding my skirt up awkwardly, I went as fast as I could. A power pee. My prom dress was cocktail length, thankfully, not a ballgown—although it had enough tulle to mosquito-proof an entire African village.

I peed. Then I washed my hands quickly but efficiently up to the wrists, humming the handwashing song we’d learned in kindergarten. I yawned, making my jaw crack. Normally, I’d be in bed by now. I splashed a little water on my face to wake me up—I was the only one of us who had forgone makeup, despite Kate’s protests—and then paused to look at myself in the mirror. I looked tired but blissful, happy. I was getting a pimple on my chin—

Boom!

I jumped in my own skin. Was that a gunshot? My eyes widened in slow motion, my hands gripping the sides of the sink in surprise. I watched the color drain out of the reflection of my face in the mirror as I heard Ricky and Jessa’s terrified screams.

Boom!

I took a step back from the sink, feeling my gut twist. My heart was racing. The screaming continued, shrill, scared, desperate. Singular. Jessa.

Boom!

I ran to the bathroom door, dropped to my knees, opened it a sliver. My breath fogged up the shiny doorknob as I pressed my face to the wall to look out the crack. I could see the whole diner, could see—

Blood. His face, unmasked but in profile, bare but for the flecks of blood across his cheeks, his lips. The gun in his hand: a sawed-off shotgun, long, black, deadly. His baseball cap turned backward, Cincinnati Reds. Pupils dilated to mere pinpricks. He was red-nosed and clearly strung out.

Jake’s hands up, his face pale beneath a thick constellation of freckles, dropping to his knees, “Please—”

Boom!

I let go of the door and fell back onto my tulle skirt with a whoosh.

And then everything was quiet.

I backed against the far wall, crab-walking, heart racing, breath coming in spurts. I couldn’t hear anything but my own gasping, the air cold against my lips as rivulets of water fell down my face, over my lips, down my neck. I was frozen, pressed against the dirty tile wall next to the garbage can underneath the paper towel dispenser.

I heard a distinctive creak and flinched, waiting for the death shot. It didn’t come. The man had gone into the men’s washroom next door.

Bam! He kicked a stall door in. It slammed against the one next to it. He was checking for witnesses.

I was frozen still, breathing hard. I reached down with shaky hands and pulled off one high heel and then the other, methodical, slow. Standing in stocking feet, I walked to the out-of-order stall on the far end of the row, listening to the madman’s kicks. Bam. Bam. Bam.

I crawled under the door, ignoring the automatic response to be grossed out, stood, and placed my heels on top of the toilet paper dispenser. The sound of him opening the door covered the soft porcelain-on-porcelain sound of me climbing on top of the broken toilet and sitting on the water tank.

Bang! He kicked the first stall door in. Bang, the second.

I held my breath, my toes curling against the toilet seat—one hand over my mouth and nose, the other against the wall, steadying my awkward position as I balanced precariously above the water in a crouch.

My heart was racing. It was beating so hard and so loudly in my ears that I was sure he could hear it.

Bang! Bang!

When he kicked each door open, the whole structure shuddered. In between each kick, his footsteps were loud and heavy; he was wearing some kind of work boots. When he kicked in the door of the stall next to mine, the flimsy divider vibrated so violently that one of my shoes slipped from the toilet paper dispenser and fell—

—into my hand, flung out on reflex. I caught the shoe by the ridiculously high heel, almost falling off the toilet to do so. I took a breath—couldn’t help it—and slammed my eyes shut so hard I could see a nebula of swirling colors on the inside of my eyelids.

Oh God oh God oh God oh God, my brain screamed in the thundering silence. My lungs burned, my eyes filled with terrified tears, and my thighs shuddered from the effort of holding myself absolutely still in such a strange way. My foot was slipping, sweaty against the toilet seat.

I heard his footsteps leaving. Leaving. I didn’t breathe until the huge metal door to the bathroom slammed shut behind him. A hush fell.

The first real breath I took was a sob—a broken, desperate noise as my stockinged foot finally slipped into the toilet, getting soaked almost to the knee. The splash of cold water up my calf shocked me into moving, and I tumbled off the toilet and against the locked stall door, feeling hot tears spill over my cheeks.

I choked on every breath, the panic attack finally taking over. A nightmare seen through the cracked door: Kate’s sparkly high-heeled shoe covered in blood; Ricky’s limp arm hanging over the table; Jake’s pale face, his lips forming the word, “Please,” voice cracking. He didn’t even have a chance to close his eyes before the shooter pulled the trigger, point blank.

It played over and over in my head like a surreal nightmare, the worst dream I’d ever had, worse even than all the nightmares that had come after we’d all watched The Ring when we were ten. We hadn’t been supposed to watch it—my mother had said no—but we’d done it anyway, and we had all been so scared that night. We made a pile of pillows and blankets in the middle of the living room and slept in a tangle wrapped so tight you almost couldn’t tell whose limbs were whose. I’d woken up with Jessa’s foot on my face the next morning.

With my eyes still closed and my teeth pressed together so hard that my jaw ached, I prayed for the first time in my life. I prayed that I was about to wake up with Jessa’s foot on my face, with a p***s drawn on my forehead in washable marker, with Kate’s face buried in my stomach and Ricky wheezing in my ear. This can’t be happening, I thought hysterically. Please, God, don’t let this be happening.

The seconds ticked by in an eerie, unnatural silence broken only by my rapid heartbeat. After what felt like an eternity, I finally let go of my high heel and heard it clatter to the floor, too loud. I opened my eyes. This wasn’t a nightmare. This was real.

I cannot describe what I felt when I finally managed to open the locked stall door. His bloody footprints stopped just a few feet from where I had been hiding, holding my breath, terrified. I walked numbly across the bathroom, one foot soaked in toilet water and freezing, leaving my own trail next to his as I reached the door.

I listened first, then pressed it open just a crack. There was no movement. I slowly opened the heavy door all the way and stepped out into the diner. There was no sound but a soft drip, drip, drip that I didn’t analyze—couldn’t think about it being someone’s lifeblood.

I checked for pulses anyway. Not Jake’s. There was next to nothing left of his face and barely enough neck left to press my cold, shaking fingers to, so I didn’t bother. I couldn’t look at him, let alone touch him.

Jessa’s beautiful white dress turned crimson; no pulse. Ricky’s fingers reaching for Kate, her arm hanging over the table, sprawled awkwardly; no pulse. Kate, I kneeled next to, my fingers slipping through her blood, my knees soaked in it; no pulse. Kate’s eyes were open; her mouth was open. I wiped my hand on my dress and then pushed her eyelids down, smudging her perfect makeup.

“Sorry,” I whispered. She’d worked so hard on it, spent an hour giving herself the perfect smoky eye for pictures.

I found Ricky’s purse, open on the floor, and dug out her iPhone. She had two texts from Robert, unread on her lock screen: the first asking if she’d maybe like to go out with him sometime, the second one, “I guess you’re already in bed, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

I swallowed back bile as I dialed 911.