The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,74
his movies, but her computer froze and started to crash.
“Dammit to hell and back with a stick,” she said. She loved making new sayings out of the bad words she knew. Her second favorite thing to say was “thanks ever so.” She had picked that up from an old Marilyn Monroe movie her friend Lacey had rented. When Sandra’s mother had told her that she was being shipped off to Colorado, she’d smiled sweetly and, with all the fake sugar she could muster, said, “Thanks ever so.” She’d gotten slapped for that one.
She glanced at the phone on her desk. Her parents had cut off her phone and e-mail after the “second incident,” as they called it. But they had forgotten about the cell phone in her purse. Her boyfriend had texted her seven times since yesterday—seven times. She was using her Cosmo trick—keep him guessing—and hadn’t called him back. She was still getting used to the word boyfriend. She said it softly several times into the mirror.
Her suitcase was sprawled across her bed but she hadn’t packed anything yet. She was still considering.
At first she had refused to pack, yelling baby things at her parents like, “You can’t make me,” and, “I’d rather die first.” In the end, she’d given in after her mother started pulling out all her oversize T-shirts and baggy jeans. She was going to Colorado, not to Siberia.
But now she was having trouble packing. Lacey had been trying to convince her that her boyfriend—Sandra smiled at the word—would come to whisk her away, like in the end of It Happened One Night. A knight in shining armor and all that. But Sandra wasn’t so sure. She thought that it would make more sense for them to play it cool, pretend that it was over, and then, when everyone least suspected it, fly off to Mexico.
She had to pack for either eventuality.
She walked over to her calendar hanging on the wall. Each day—for the past twenty-four days—had an X on it. Her mother had once asked her what the X’s were for. Sandra had lied, saying that she was marking off the days she had been dieting. She mother hadn’t asked any more about it. Sandra had been careful since then to keep her mother out of her room.
If her mother had checked, she would have realized that the X’s started on the day of the first incident. Sandra counted the X’s again. For twenty-four days she had had a boyfriend.
The first incident had started like one of those stories you read in Cosmo’s agony column. Miss Baca had caught her with a silver flask—bought with birthday money from her grandma—full of vodka. She had been sent to the principal’s office and they had called the cops. That was the first time she had met her boyfriend. Her lover. She giggled at the word.
She considered packing the calendar, but there was a chance that her aunt would be nosy and go through her suitcase once she got to Colorado. She made an exaggerated sigh—a “Greta Garbo lament,” Lacey called it—and looked back at her empty suitcase.
Lucy got to work just in time for the editor’s meeting at three o’clock, but she paid little attention. She was thinking about Melissa Baca. When she got back to her desk, she paged Tommy Martinez. He called her back fifteen minutes later.
“Hey, boss. I got your message. What’s up?” he asked.
“Tommy, I need a favor. It’s important.”
She heard the wariness in his voice when he said, “Sure, boss.”
She took a deep breath. “Tommy, I need to know the names of the sources who told you Melissa Baca was doing drugs.”
He hesitated. For too long.
“Tommy, I know it’s not usually how I do things, but I have to know.” He still didn’t answer. Lucy’s run-in with Hector Morales last night had started her thinking. What if he was telling the truth? What if Melissa Baca hadn’t done drugs? By the answers Hector gave to Gil’s questions, she could tell the Gil had gotten bad info from someone. But from whom? And if Gil had gotten bad info, maybe the newspaper had, too.
“I promise you that I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone if I can help it, but there is the possibility that Melissa didn’t do drugs. If we’ve misrepresented the facts to the reader …”
“We didn’t misrepresent anything. The syringe was found in her car and our sources confirmed she was using drugs.”