Out of Order by Casey Lawrence

Author:Casey Lawrence [Lawrence, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

June 27th

“NO, MIKE!” I startled myself awake with a yell, still half-dreaming of that night in October. My tenuous connection to that night snapped like a rubber band, leaving only the too-tight cuffs of my pajamas to remind me of that blasted Tinker Bell costume.

With a thunder of footsteps up the stairs, my mother burst through the door, a flurry of red hair and white powder. I stared at her blankly as she stood frozen in the doorway, as though she’d startled herself.

“Are you okay?” she asked after a long moment of maintained eye contact. “I heard you yell out.”

“I had a bad dream,” I said, absently scratching at my arm. “What’s that you’re covered in?”

“Flour,” my mother supplied, coming to the side of my bed slowly, as if approaching a deer in the forest. “I’m making pancakes.”

“You never make pancakes,” I said, but she ignored me. “Pancakes are for birthdays.” Or for when your friends get brutally murdered, my brain supplied. I flinched at the invasive thought.

My mom sat down on the edge of my bed and reached for my hair, pulling at the sleep-loosened curls. “Your head must hurt, after sleeping on all these pins….”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I mumbled, closing my eyes while she carded through my hair, pulling out stray bobby pins. I’d forgotten they were there, hadn’t given them a passing thought since Kate had slid them into place so effortlessly I hadn’t felt them pinch or tug all night.

“Did you dream about—?” My mom’s hands jerked a little in my hair before resuming their soothing motion. “Sorry.”

“No,” I sighed. “About that fight I had with Ricky on Halloween.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I shouldn’t have let her date Mike. He treated her like property right from the beginning.” I felt as if my throat was closing in on itself, but the words didn’t stop pushing through it. “If she’d gone out with Robert instead, maybe she would’ve gone home with him after prom. Maybe she wouldn’t have been at the diner with us when—”

My mother’s hands stopped moving in my hair and instead fell to my shoulders, gripping me hard. “Don’t think like that. Hey, no. Stop, Cor. Corinna!” She shook me back and forth roughly, and I opened my eyes to glare at her. The tears began to fall immediately, thick and wet where they clung to my eyelashes. “You girls do everything together. This is not your fault.” Her voice cracked on the word fault. “You are not to blame for this.”

“I was in the bathroom! Alone!” I croaked, tears salty in the corners of my mouth. “We always go to the bathroom together. Always. I should have made one of them come with me! Or all of them. I shouldn’t have gone alone.”

“Then you’d all be dead,” my mother whispered. “He’d have found you in the bathroom and killed all of you, right in front of each other. You could have been killed, Corinna. This isn’t a game of ‘what if’ that you want to play.

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