Deadly Design (9780698173613) Read online

  But now I’m curious. I want to run. I want to run fast. I want to see what I can do.

  In the middle of town, there’s a road that goes over a highway. The road slants gradually at first, then keeps climbing until it finally levels out for several yards, then slants down again. There’s a sidewalk alongside the road. I jogged the three blocks to the center of town, and now I wait for the imaginary gun to sound in my head. Then I run.

  I want to run fast. I want to feel my heart pounding. I want to feel it screaming in my chest. I want to feel blood pushing through my veins, forcing its way through the narrow channels like bulls forcing their way down the streets of Pamplona. I want to feel hot and sweaty, and if I’m going to die, I want to be the one to make it happen.

  I push myself as hard as I can, willing my legs to go as fast as they can. My thighs start to burn as I near the top of the overpass. I fly across the sidewalk, oblivious to the cars moving beneath me, and when the road starts to slant, it’s all I can do to put the brakes on before I sail past the stop sign and into traffic.

  Shit! And I can’t help but smile. That felt incredible. No wonder Connor loved it. I turn around, and without giving myself any time to catch my breath, I take off again. I wish there was someone, some coach waiting with a stopwatch on the other side. I know I’m not breaking a record. No one’s ever kept track of how long it takes to run the overpass. But it feels like I’m flying.

  I’m not tired. I’m barely winded, but I collapse in the grass along the sidewalk and stare up at the cloudless sky. I remember a day like this once. It was last summer. I’d been mowing the lawn, and halfway through, I stopped and just lay down in the grass in our backyard. I was watching a plane flying so high it seemed motionless against the clear blue, and then Connor’s face was looking down at me.

  “Come run with me,” he said.

  “I’m mowing,” I said back to him.

  “Yeah, it looks like it.” Connor kicked my foot. “Come on. You’ll like it. Hell, you’ll love it. Just come with me.”

  “I’m too out of shape.”

  Connor scoffed. “If you get too tired to make it back, I’ll carry you, okay? But you won’t get tired. Come on.” He grabbed my hand and tried to pull me up.

  “I hate running,” I said, and a little voice wanted me to add, and I hate you. God, I came so close to saying it. Really close. I mean, he wanted me to go running with him? Seriously? Yeah, right, take me out in public and show everyone how much better you are than me. Let them see me struggling to keep up with you.

  “You’ve never tried,” he said. “I’m telling you, you’ll love it.”

  I jumped up then. I was hot from mowing, pissed that he seriously wanted to humiliate me in front of the whole town. Pissed that he was telling me what I’d love. Who was he to tell me anything? Mr. Perfect. Mr. Mascot for the whole fucking town. “You want to run, go run. Have a blast. But leave me the fuck alone.” I pushed him away, literally. I put my hands on him, and I pushed him.

  Connor didn’t push me back. He looked at me. His eyes, those fucking blue eyes, trying to say what words couldn’t. But I didn’t listen. Why didn’t I listen?

  I stare up at the sky, the same blue sky. Connor knew I’d love running. He knew because he saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself. He saw that I was like him. And I pushed him away.

  I feel tears slipping from my eyes, sliding down my temples. Then I hear a voice.

  “Need an ambulance?” someone hollers from the window of a car that’s pulled up to the curb. Teddy Eskew, school bully and X-Man wannabe, is getting out. “You in training or something?” he asks as I get back onto my feet.

  “Leave me alone, Teddy,” I warn.

  “Leave you alone?” Teddy’s wearing a T-shirt with the arms cut off to show off his steroid-enhanced muscles. He looks like he’s been hitting the weights and the ’roids pretty hard. Large veins run along his inflated biceps. God, he’s such an idiot. He’s going to have big muscles, testicles like raisins, and a liver more effed up than an alcoholic’s.

  “Come on, Teddy,” a guy says. I recognize the voice. It’s Byron Holt. He’s a scrawny little math geek. He and Teddy had an arrangement. Byron would do Teddy’s geometry homework, and Teddy would quit giving him bloody noses. Now it’s summer, and they’re hanging out? Maybe they bonded over isosceles triangles and bloody tissues.

  “Teddy,” he hollers from the window, “you’ll mess up your probation.”

  “So what are you training for?” Teddy asks, ignoring him. “Are you trying out to be the next Connor McAdams?”

  “I’m not telling you again, Teddy. Leave. Me. Alone.”

  He smiles, like I knew he would. And I ram my head as hard as I can into his gut. Unlucky for me, there’s a stop sign a few feet behind Teddy, and between my head ramming into his stomach and the metal post of the sign ramming against his back, the contents of his stomach are cannoned right out of him and onto my back. I strip my T-shirt off and, without giving him time to recover, punch Teddy as hard as I can in the face. He staggers, avoiding the stop sign this time. He raises his fists like he’s going to punch me back, but I nail him again in the chin.

  “Stop!” It’s a girl’s voice. I hear it gradually drawing closer, but I don’t care. It feels so good to hit someone, to hit the prick who’s slammed my locker door shut and nearly severed my fingers at least a dozen times since freshman year. Teddy bends forward, and I’m about to knee him right in his face when someone catches me by the arm. Instinctively, I push the person off. When I turn, I see Emma fall to the sidewalk.

  “Shit! Are you all right?” I offer her my hand.

  She’s wearing short shorts and a T-shirt identifying her as a member of the high school yearbook staff. I don’t see any blood on her knees or her elbows, but I know I pushed her hard.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she yells, slapping at my hand and getting to her feet. “Look at him!”

  I do as instructed. Byron is helping Teddy toward the car. There’s blood streaming down his face, hopefully not from a broken nose. The blow to his stomach has left him unable to straighten his spine. I think of all the times that he’s shoved me against the wall or come up behind me and pushed my face into the water fountain when I was getting a drink. I’ve never gotten to defend myself against him, not without some teacher intervening first, and it feels good.

  I watch Byron get behind the wheel and drive away, then look at Emma. The disgust in her beautiful eyes tells me that she sees what I feel: no remorse.

  She starts back toward the clown car she abandoned by the curb, then stops and turns. “You have to grow up sometime, Kyle. I know you’re dealing with a lot, but that’s no excuse.”

  I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I start laughing. I’ve never been in a serious relationship, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that laughing at a pissed-off girl just makes her more pissed off. Still I can’t help it. “Me—dealing with a lot! You have no idea.”

  She stops mid flip-flop stomp and stares at me. “Is something else going on?” she asks. “Something I don’t know about?”

  Her hair is divided into pigtails, and on her, it’s actually a good look. But I hate the glistening of her blue eyes. I hate those ever-present tears.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Everything’s fine.” I glance toward my barfed-on T-shirt and debate whether to pick it up or not.

  “I’m glad,” Emma says. “I saw your Facebook post about the dog, the one with the strange name? You find his owner yet?”

  “Not yet.” I don’t have to fake a look of concern or disappointment at this. It’s totally genuine.

  “How is he? Such a weird name for a dog.”

  “Yeah, I’m guessing James M. is a science fiction buff.”

  She purses her lips in agreement. “What kind of dog is he?”

  “Mutt,�
� I say without pausing to give it any thought, then thinking better of it, “Might be part beagle. That’s what the vet said.”

  “Eighteen, that’s really old.”

  I want to say, “That depends,” but I don’t.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” she says. She takes a step closer, then steps back again when she notices that I’m not wearing a shirt. I know my physique is nothing like Connor’s. I don’t have his rounded pectoral muscles, and I sure as hell don’t have his six-pack abs. But she stares at my skin, stares at the flatness of my stomach, and I can almost feel the ache in her fingers because they want so much to reach out and touch me.

  I bend down to pick up my shirt but decide that anything with Teddy’s puke on it is not worth taking home.

  “That’s littering,” Emma says.

  “So you want to lecture me about environmental issues?” I ask. “Don’t worry; I’ll eventually do my part to help the Earth.”

  Let me count the ways. If we don’t find Dr. Mueller and figure out how to keep me from dying on my eighteenth birthday, I won’t eat any more food, consume any more water, breathe any more air, or leave any more puked-on T-shirts or fast food wrappers where they don’t belong. Oh, and I can’t forget the whole feeding-the-worms thing. That really helps out the good old Earth. I’ll become human compost.

  “I’m moving,” she blurts out. “I’ve got an aunt and uncle who live in Duluth, so . . . I’m moving up there.” Emma looks at me, her eyes piercing mine as she waits for my response.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” she says.

  My breath is gone, like an invisible Teddy just landed a lung-crushing blow. “Tomorrow? For how long?”

  “I’m moving,” she says. “Taking all of my stuff and moving to Duluth.”

  “No way. You can’t move to Duluth. Nobody moves to Duluth. The people who live there never even moved there. They were born there and haven’t realized they can leave. And tomorrow’s the third. You’re going to leave the day before July Fourth?”

  “I can’t be here anymore,” she says. “I need a new start. I need to go somewhere different. Everywhere I go, people look at me like they’re surprised I haven’t fallen completely apart. The truth is, I don’t know how I’m holding together. It’s just too hard here. There’re too many memories. Too many reminders.”

  I want to drop down on my knees and beg her not to go. I want to promise her that I’ll take care of her. I can be Connor now. Really be him because we are the same. We’re both “superior” beings. But I don’t know where Dr. Mueller is. I could spend the next two years of my life running and studying and becoming Connor, and then once Emma loves me, loves me like she loved him, I could die too.

  But I don’t plan on dying. The arrangements are being made for our trip to the cardiac hospital in Dallas. The doctors have to come up with something. They have to. But if they don’t, I don’t want Emma to see Connor dead twice. I don’t want her to go through it again.

  I nod my head. “Okay,” I say. “I understand.”

  She looks stunned and a little relieved. “I thought you would fight for me a little harder,” she says, her cheeks and her eyes reddening.

  Fight for her? Is that what she wants? It’s what I want, goddamn it! But I can’t. Not now.

  “I just want you to be happy, Emma. That’s all I want. So you’re leaving tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “What about your friends? How’s Cami taking it? You guys have been best friends forever.”

  “She doesn’t want me to go, but people don’t always get what they want,” she says in a hard voice I barely recognize.

  “You’re not taking the clown car, are you?”

  Emma sighs. “Yes, Kyle. I’m going to drive all the way to Duluth on only one tank of gas, leaving little to no carbon footprint.”

  I’ve been to Duluth. My mom’s uncle lives up there, and we went for a visit one Thanksgiving. There was a blizzard, and we ended up stuck there for a whole week. And Emma’s taking the Smart car?

  “Can I come by in the morning and say good-bye?”

  She hesitates. “Will you wear a shirt?” Emma’s eyes try to stay focused on mine, but they fail, falling for a second to my bare torso.

  “Sure.” I smile, or do my best imitation of one.

  Emma tries to smile back, and I watch her walk toward her car, expecting that, any second, she’ll turn to glance at me. But she doesn’t. She just drives away.

  16

  It’s only a few blocks to Emma’s house. In a small town, every place is basically a few blocks away. I roll down the window and take in the smell of cut grass and the early morning dampness that skirts the front porches of old houses. Emma’s parents are talking and glancing at their watches as I pull up behind her father’s SUV. I take one last glance around the Jeep, and then grab the title out of the glove compartment. Emma is sitting on their front porch, holding a yellow tabby in her arms, telling him good-bye. She hugs the cat, kisses it on the head, opens the front door, and lets the cat tumble into the house.

  She’s smiling as she walks toward me in her comfortable traveling clothes—cutoff sweat pants and a T-shirt. Her eyes are puffy and red. She looks at her parents and nods toward the house. Her dad points at his watch, then follows his wife through the front door.

  “Up bright and early,” Emma says.

  “I thought Cami would be here,” I say, swallowing my emotions deep down into the pit of my stomach. Be strong. Be strong, but it’s hard.

  “Cami was over last night. We said our good-byes then. And it’s not like I’m falling off the planet. I still have a phone and Facebook. No way you guys are totally getting rid of me.”

  I can smell the sweet scent of Emma’s shampoo. God, I want so much to place a hand under her chin and lift her face to mine. I want to kiss her hello, not good-bye.

  I hand Emma the title to Connor’s Jeep along with a notarized bill of sale saying that my dad sold her the Jeep for a dollar.

  She opens the piece of paper. “What’s this?” she asks. She lifts her hands questioningly, so I drop the key into her outstretched palm.

  “It’s yours now. You just take that to the DMV in Minnesota, and they’ll give you a new title. But that’s legal, so if you get stopped for speeding, you can prove you own the car. And you might get stopped, because the Jeep goes more than thirty miles an hour.”

  “My car goes more than thirty. I’m not taking Connor’s Jeep. Your Jeep.” She tries to hand the keys and title back to me.

  “This is what Connor would want. There’s no way in hell he’d let you drive that . . . car . . . all the way to Minnesota, let alone drive it around in Minnesota. The average snow drift is three times as tall as that car. I doubt it could get through two inches of snow, let alone two feet.”

  “They have snow plows. They salt the streets. They know how to handle winter up north.”

  “And everybody owns a four-wheel-drive pickup. I mean, could you imagine trying to strap a deer onto that?” I motion toward the Smart car. “Connor would want you to be safe. That’s all he’d care about, and you know it. This is what he would want. So, let me do this—for him.” I say the words that will convince her, because even though I’d do anything for her, first and foremost, I owe it to Connor. I owe it to him to look after her.

  “But what about you? What are you supposed to drive?”

  I walk toward the Smart car and pretend to wipe a smudge off the hood. “While you’re polluting the ozone, me and my superhero vehicle will be doing our part to save the planet.”

  “And what if there’s a blizzard in Kansas?” she asks.

  “First off,” I point out, “if there’s three inches of snow, school will get cancelled. And even if it isn’t, I can walk. If I think there’s any chance the snow will melt during the d
ay, which it usually does, I’ll just throw . . . Betsy here,” I pat the hood, “into my backpack before I leave for school, then take her out and drive her home afterward.”

  “You hate that car. I can’t trade with you.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “I don’t hate the car. I love it. Really, really, love it. Every time I get behind the wheel, I’ll know you’re safe in the Jeep. So I’ll help you unload the two shoe boxes you managed to fit into your old car and help you load up the Jeep.”

  Emma laughs and sobs at the same time. She wraps her arms around me, and I wrap mine around her. I hug her tightly because I don’t want to let go of the girl who always looks back and smiles at me. She’s so beautiful everyone notices her, but she notices me. Even being Connor’s girlfriend, her eyes still kind of lit whenever she was around me, like I mattered. But they blazed when she was with Connor. I tighten my arms even more for Connor, because he can’t hold her. His arms are pressed against his sides, or maybe they’re crossed over his chest. I don’t know because I never saw him in the coffin.

  I feel her body trembling, and then she lifts her tear-streaked face and rises onto her tiptoes. I know what’s coming, and I close my eyes. Her lips are soft. At first, they barely touch mine, but then she starts to press her mouth hard against mine. My lips give way to hers, and she tastes like mint toothpaste and salt. I want to let her kiss me, to let her pretend she’s kissing Connor good-bye. After all, she is kissing his DNA, but the taste of tears is too much, and I pull away. She doesn’t look at me as she wipes her face against her sleeve.

  Her parents emerge from the garage, where I’m pretty sure they’ve been eavesdropping.

  Her dad slaps his hands together and smiles like she’s heading off to college instead of running away. “We’ve got a tight schedule,” he says.

  Together, Emma and I move boxes from one car to the other. Then I leave. I don’t want to see her driving away.