Half Lives Read online

  HALF LIVES

  Sara Grant

  Indigo

  Dedication

  To the memory of Margaret Carey – writer, artist and friend – your inspiration lives on . . .

  Half-life:

  1) the time required for half of something to undergo a process: as

  a. the time required for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to become disintegrated

  b. the time required for half the amount of a substance (as a drug, radioactive tracer, or pesticide) in or introduced into a living system or ecosystem to be eliminated or disintegrated by natural processes

  2) a period of usefulness or popularity preceding decline or obsolescence

  – By permission. From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, 11th Edition © 2012 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated (www.Merriam-Webster.com)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Sara Grant

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  If you’d asked me that day whether I could lie, cheat, steal and kill, I would have said ab-so-lutely not. I’ve told little white lies to my parents to stay out of trouble. And, sure, I borrowed a few answers off Lola on that one chemistry test. (Who cares that U stands for uranium or that it’s number ninety-two on the Periodic Table of Elements?) I shoplifted a Kit-Kat when I was seven on a dare, but I’d never kill. Not possible. I relocate spiders rather than squash them. (And I hate those beasties!)

  But now I’ve knowingly and wilfully committed all those acts on the Richter scale of freaking horrible – from lying to killing. I’m not proud of it. I learned that surviving isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you survive, you’ve got to live with the guilt, and that’s more difficult than looking someone in the eye and pulling the trigger. Trust me. I’ve done both. Killing takes a twitch of the finger. Absolution takes several lifetimes.

  When the final bell rang on that last normal day of my life, I found Lola reclining next to our open locker, applying my Candy Corn Crush lip gloss with her little finger. Even in the Friday afternoon stampede, students and teachers steered clear of Lola as if she projected her own force field. With her combat boots and torn fishnets, the whole military-Goth thing she had going on could be kind of intimidating. But she was like a Tootsie Pop – hard on the outside but sweet and weirdly awesome on the inside.

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Lola asked the moment she spotted me.

  ‘Bad would be an improvement,’ I replied, and stuffed my books in our locker.

  On a scale of one to ten where one equals ‘dumped by your boyfriend of three-and-a-quarter months via text two weeks before senior prom’ and ten equals ‘winning a reality TV show and being insta-famous’, my day was a big ginormous one.

  Literally. Yep. Tristan ended our romance with a text: I WAN 2 BRK UP. That’s what he wrote. Didn’t even bother with real words.

  In my seventeen years, I’d learned that, no matter how heinous you think your life is, stay tuned for a Psycho-style surprise before the credits roll. And whatever higher power you worship – God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Zeus or Lady Gaga – can’t save you from the dull, rusty knife.

  ‘So . . .’ Lola looked me up and down, admiring my standard uniform of smart-ass T-shirt (today’s: a smiley face with Have a Mediocre Day written underneath), cargo pants and flip-flops. ‘You need a diversion. What should we do?’

  I draped my messenger bag across my torso, tugging my dreadlocks free from the strap. ‘Starbucks?’

  She shook her head. ‘Already shot-gunned two Red Bulls to get through English.’

  ‘Movie? That theatre down by that one place is showing Hitchcock—’

  She raised her hand to interrupt. ‘Um, that’s one of those black-and-white ones, right?’

  I nodded.

  She waved the idea away. ‘That’s like playing a board game when you’ve got a Wii.’

  ‘But the man knows freepy.’

  ‘Freepy. I like that – freaking creepy.’ She fished the phone out of her faux-military jacket and immediately started tweeting. ‘You have a gift,’ she said. Lo and I liked to create what we called ‘the Ripple’ – not as in raspberry or caramel fudge – but a ripple of words.

  Someone had been the first to utter whatever or crupid. My dad still periodically, and completely cringeworthily, said dude. It was Lola’s and my mission to take our linguistic influence global. We’d come close with borriffic – terrifically boring. I’d proclaimed Mr Kramer’s third lecture on World War II borriffic. The next day I heard a freshman using it in the cafeteria and three weeks later one of Lola’s friend’s friends used the word on Facebook.

  ‘I give it two days before it’s Wikipedia bound.’ Lola’s fingers feverishly tapped her phone.

  ‘Monument?’ I suggested after she’d tweeted our newest Ripple. I loved Washington DC’s morbid décor. I could barely flip my dreads without swatting some monument to dead people. We sometimes picked a DC landmark and saw how many tourists’ snaps we could sneak into, or we would pretend to be tour guides and feed visitors false info: Many people don’t know this, but the Washington Monument is named for President George Washington’s father and shaped like his unnaturally pointy head.

  ‘Nah. Too much effort.’ Lola looped her arm through mine and practically dragged me off school premises. ‘Mall,’ she decided. Our mecca. ‘You need a little retail therapy.’

  Once we’d outpaced all the other Capital Academy refugees, I confessed, ‘Tristan dumped me.’ Saying it was like reliving the dumpage all over again. He was my first serious boyfriend and what Lola and I called the trifecta of Gs – gorgeous, geek and giggle. He was equal parts good looks, smarts and sense of humour, and that was a next-to-impossible combo. I hadn’t been planning to marry him or anything, but I’d thought we might at least make it to graduation.

  She wrapped me in a too-tight hug. ‘Icie, I’m soooooo sorry.’

  This was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to me, but I didn’t want to be one of those blubbery broken-hearted girls. If we kept talking about it, however, I was going to lose it. I wiggled free. ‘What a . . .’ My throat clenched to stifle a sob. ‘I mean he’s a total . . .’

  Lola squinted and puckered her lips as if she was thinking, then a wicked smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘Totass.’

  It took me a second to dissect the word. ‘Je
rzilla.’

  ‘Dumboid.’ She laughed and then glanced at me to make sure it was OK to laugh when my heart had been pulverized like a grande coffee Frappuccino hold-the-whip-topping.

  I smiled. ‘Fridiot.’

  ‘Yep, Tristan is the biggest fridiot in DC.’

  ‘America.’

  ‘The world.’

  ‘Universe.’

  ‘Galaxy.’

  We exploded with laughter. We leaned on each other to steady ourselves. Tears streamed down my cheeks. My sides ached. Our laughter dwindled to sighs. My attitude shifted a smidge. With Lola as my life support, I no longer felt like I was going to die.

  As we walked, Lola lit the cigarette she kept stashed in her bra. Even though she turned away to exhale, the cigarette smoke seemed to curl around me. I moved away to find fresh air and wished that ditching Tristan’s toxicity would be as easy. But his rejection clung to me like smoke. Why did he break up with me? Was I so . . . so . . . but I couldn’t find the right combo – ugly and disgusting? Stupid and revolting?

  Lola paused and ground her cigarette into the pavement. She shifted all her weight onto the ball of her foot and shredded the stub.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ I nodded towards the cigarette confetti on the ground.

  She started walking. ‘I don’t know if I should tell you.’

  ‘What?’ I grabbed her arm and forced her to stop. I felt a hiccup of panic.

  The worst thing was not knowing, right?

  ‘The fridiot already posted your break-up on Facebook with one of those winking smiley faces.’ She patted herself down, searching for another emergency cig. ‘Teek saw it and told Will, who told Tawn, who told me.’

  Complete and utter humiliation! My gooey sadness from the dumpage solidified into anger.

  The gossip Ripple was way more powerful than the word Ripple.

  Social death by Facebook. I take it back. Knowledge can suck.

  I started walking, stomping really, in the general direction of the Metro. My life at Capital Academy was over. I fished out my phone from my cargo pants pocket. I tapped the FB app. My profile picture of Tristan and me stared back. It was taken on our seventh-and-a-half date. (Our first date only counted as a half because he didn’t take me to the dance, but we left together.) The picture was snapped after we’d seen a double feature of American Psycho and the original Hitchcock Psycho. He’s pretending to stab me in the back with an imaginary knife and I’m mock-screaming in horror. A bit prophetic.

  I changed my Facebook status to ‘single’ and switched my picture to one of Lo and me last summer. We’d been trying on three-hundred-dollar sunglasses in this snooty boutique, right before the saleslady with the awful orange fake tan kicked us out. I was trying to think of the perfect snarky thing to post about Tristan when Lola caught up with me.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Some things are just not meant to be.’

  Yeah, but how did you know? What if Tristan and I were meant to be? Or maybe there was no such thing as meant to be, only shit happens and you make the best of it.

  We stopped at the Metro entrance to consult our phones before we went underground. I scrolled through Twitter. Lola had like a thousand followers. #Freepy was already multiplying.

  I checked Facebook again. Molly ‘Ho’ Andersen had just ‘liked’ Tristan’s break-up post. She was such a . . . As my mind strained for the perfect combo word, my phone buzzed and my dad’s photo flashed on the screen. I’d programmed his ring tone to be the screeching noise from the shower scene in Psycho. I ignored it. I needed a proper sulk. I wasn’t ready for Dad’s platitudes: ‘everything happens for a reason’ or ‘see it as an opportunity’. I didn’t want to ‘make the best of it’ yet.

  Before I could put my phone away, the ominous notes from the movie Jaws played over and over. A text from Mum. I didn’t need the ‘suck it up, you’re a Murray’ lecture. ‘Stiff upper lip’. ‘Brave face’. ‘Chin up’. ‘Keep calm and carry on’. All that stoic British crap. I’d been dumped and I was entitled to feel like mouldy gum on the bottom of last season’s stilettos. I shoved the phone into my cargo pants pocket, double-checking that it wasn’t the one with the hole. I’d lost about twenty dollars that way. But the telephonic harassment didn’t relent. My pants sounded like a horror-movie soundtrack. I dug the phone out and flicked to the text messages. They all said the same thing: 911. COME HOME ASAP.

  Yeah, we’d come up with that oh-so-difficult-to-decipher code; 911 before any message meant an emergency for real. What family had a secret emergency code? Answer: a family whose mum worked for the federal government and whose dad was a nuclear physicist. We got one of those Barbie-posed, all-purpose holiday cards from the White House, and the president actually signed ours.

  Mum and Dad were always getting threats from some activists who were a few crayons short of a sixty-four-pack – if you know what I mean. Mum assured me the threats were no big deal, but we’d still come up with our top-secret code.

  When I saw the 911 texts, my stomach dropped like it did when I rode the Mega Coaster Rama at Flying Flags America. I’d only had one 911 from my parents ever, when Dad had his car accident. That message said, 911 DC MERCY HOSPITAL.

  ‘I gotta go,’ I said to Lola. Suddenly, being dumped by fridiot Tristan didn’t matter as much.

  Lola paused her texting. ‘Seriously, Icie?’

  ‘Sorry, Lo,’ I said with a shrug. ‘My parents have invoked the code. I’ll call you later.’

  ‘It’s going to be OK,’ Lola said, hugging me goodbye. ‘We will either get you another date for prom or you can stay home with me and we’ll watch classic horror movies and eat tubes of chocolate-chip cookie dough until we vomit.’

  ‘Can I wear my prom dress and killer purple shoes?’ I tried to joke. If I could make a joke, then things couldn’t be that bad.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Later!’ I called as I waved down a yellow taxi and texted my parents that I was ON MY WAY!

  By the time the taxi pulled up in front of our three-storey townhouse, I’d talked myself down from the ledge of worry my parents’ texts had pushed me towards. Everything looked normal. Flames weren’t shooting from our bedroom windows. The street was ambulance- and police-free. I relaxed a little. It couldn’t be too terrible if the sun was still filtering through the trees that lined our street and flashing on the tinted windows of the BMWs, Jaguars and Lexuses parked in a neat row. The nannies for the Smith-Wellses and the Pattersons chatted over strollers containing sleeping toddlers. Mrs Neusbaum, in wedge heels that matched her helmet of snow-white hair, clip-clopped after her pug, Sir Milo Winterbottom.

  I stuffed twenty dollars through the taxi’s payment slot and told the driver to keep the change. I climbed the steps to my house two at a time. The door swung open before I reached the top, and Mum pushed past me.

  ‘Wait! Stop!’ she shouted at the taxi.

  Dad was slumped against the banister in the entryway.

  ‘Dad, what’s going on?’ I asked, and stepped inside. He didn’t answer.

  The backpack my parents had bought for my one and only camping trip was resting at his feet. My Save the Planet, Rock the World badge was fastened to the front pocket. The last I remembered, my backpack had been stuffed under my bed, and my parents adhered to the progressive parents’ handbook and never, ever trespassed in my bedroom.

  I scanned from my backpack, past Dad’s wrinkled khakis and polo to his face. His eyes were red and puffy and his normally carefully brushed hair looked like he’d had a mishap with hair wax and a pack of wildcats.

  ‘Dad?’ I asked him a bazillion questions with that one word. He didn’t respond. He wouldn’t look at me. I had never, ever seen my dad like this. My pinprick of worry was now a full-on jugular artery gush.

  ‘Dad, what is it? What’s the matter?’ I asked. My legs turned to rubber. I had to steady myself on the hall table, which caused a vase of white
roses to wobble and a pile of mail to avalanche to our recently refinished mahogany floor. Neither Dad nor I made a move to stop the cascade of papers. The slick glossy cover of Mum’s Modern Politics mixed uneasily with the dull recycled pages of Dad’s Nuclear Energy Digest.

  Mum burst in. ‘OK, the cab’s sorted.’ She shut the door behind her. ‘Have you told her, Jack?’ She looked from Dad to me and back again, tennis-match style. ‘No, clearly not.’

  This was the first time I’d seen my parents in the same room in about a month. Dad was a morning person so he made me homemade granola with fresh blueberries every day for breakfast – because it was my favourite. Mum was the queen of the night so she checked my homework after the ten o’clock news with a reward of Ben & Jerry’s and whatever film was on the Horror Channel. We used to cross paths at dinner, but for the last few months our daily family time had slipped.

  ‘Icie.’ Mum paused and it was like watching the battery drain from a toy robot. Her voice and posture softened. ‘We need to leave DC.’

  Dad handed me my backpack. I pushed it away. What was she saying? I didn’t understand what was happening. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pressed an imaginary wrinkle from her skirt. I noticed the transfer of sweat from her palms to the black silk. ‘Please give me your phone.’ She held out her hand.

  I protectively covered my cargo pants pocket. ‘But I need it to—’ Mum flashed ‘Talk to the hand’ before I could prioritize why I so desperately needed my iPhone: (1) to update Facebook, (2) to text Lola, (3) to listen to the playlists Lola and I had created, with titles like ‘Wake Up ’n’ Smell the Urine’, ‘Songs to Slit Your Wrists By’ and ‘Make-out Mix’ (subtitled ‘Virginity Blues’).

  The look on her face told me that none of that was important. I handed her my phone. She switched it off and laid it on the hall table. She smoothed a lock of hair that had escaped from the blonde uni-curl she called a bob. ‘This is serious, Icie. We need to go somewhere safe,’ Mum continued as if she hadn’t just unplugged me from my life.