Page 12 of White Lights
“Dez?”
Her mom stands in the doorway. Dez pockets the napkin and searches for the reassurance she usually finds in her mother’s gaze. The problem is she doesn’t recognize her mom, her face painted strange by grief and panic. Dez watched the change come over her as they sat in the hospital lobby last night, and Dez whispered her version of the story, only leaving out that while fighting off the man in the mask, Dez had taken out his eye. She’d been too sickened with herself to tell her mom that part.
And one more thing. Instinctively, she left out the interlude with the stranger on the motorcycle, before the cops showed up.
She had told her mother, in other words, what mattered aboutMo’s current situation. And it changed her mother into a new person, someone Dez wasn’t acquainted with and wasn’t sure liked her very much.
“The police want you to sit for questioning.”
Dez nods.
“Uncle Bob doesn’t think you should talk to them yet. Without a lawyer.”
“Do they think I—”
“They do,” her uncle says, coming to stand behind her mom. He stuffs his hands in his jean pockets, worrying the crease between his eyes. His bad news stance, a more serious version of his pose every time Dez makes an expensive mistake at the Dairy Barn. “All the cash is missing from the till. And there’s no evidence anyone else was there last night. No fingerprints but yours on the cash register. Or on the driver’s side of your car.”
“That’s impossible,” Dez says.
“Maybe when they get the DNA evidence back from the lab …” But her uncle doesn’t sound optimistic.
“I’m not making him up.” Anger flares in Dez. “There was a man with a mask and a gun. Why else would I—” She closes her eyes. She can’t go back to the moment she burned Mo. “How else would my car have crashed into the ditch?”
“They think you were driving,” Uncle Bob says quietly. “They think you crashed and ran.”
Dez looks at her mother. “Mom?”
“You need a lawyer, Dez,” her mother says, looking down at her hands.
Is this the moment Dez reaches into her apron and shows her mom and her uncle the eye? It might be the only evidence supporting her side of the story, the truth. But she hesitates. Her family is already sodisgusted with her, she can’t bring herself to show them what else she did last night.
Out the window, Dez sees the two cops who’d given her a ride to the hospital. They’re heading for the automatic doors, for the waiting room. For her.
Dez stands and brushes past her family. She sees a sign for the cafeteria one flight up and hurries for the stairs. She’s close to hyperventilating when she bursts into the empty, cavernous room.
The seating area is open, but the buffet and registers are closed and dim. Dez sinks onto a hard, beige chair in a dark corner. She puts her head down on the Formica table. How quickly her entire life has changed. Five hours ago, she’d been mopping the Dairy Barn floor, her biggest concern getting her film school application in before the midnight deadline. Which seems ridiculous now. She’d been considering texting Asher. Way back when ambition and flirtation still existed.
Somehow texting Asher doesn’t feel ridiculous. In fact, it feels almost urgent. She could use someone to take her mind off things.
She doesn’t have to tell him about Mo, about the alternate reality she slipped into when she threw that pan of oil. She can pretend she did just apply to AFI. She can pretend that even though it’s ungodly late, she wanted him to be the first to know. She can pretend to still be the filmmaker Asher had met that day on the beach.
She feels for her phone in her pocket, but just as she’s about to take it out, the aroma of weak coffee finds her nose.
Dez looks up to see the motorcycle rider from the county road.
There’s a mischievous late-night twinkle in his eye as he sets down two lidded Styrofoam cups of coffee, then dumps an assortment of chips, candy bars, and plastic-wrapped cookies on the table in front of her.
“Where did you—” she starts to say.
“Hot meals end at eleven. But the vending machines party all night long.”
“Forget the food,” Dez says. “Where did you come from? What are you doing here?”
“Well, Dez, the truth is—”
“How do you know my name?” she demands, shooting to her feet so she can look him in the eye. He’s half a foot taller than her and seems amused by her attempt at chesting up to him. She fishes into her pocket for the napkin. “What is this?”
He takes the napkin from her, stares at it with interest, as if he’s seeing it for the first time. “It appears to be a portrait of you.”
