The House Guests Read online

  “Put the chest in the back seat. Savannah, I hope you don’t mind keeping it beside you. It’ll be a little cramped.”

  Savannah climbed in beside the chest, and Madeline clicked her seat back into place before she got into the driver’s seat.

  “Better you than me,” Lolly said, speaking for the first time. Then she giggled. The sound was somewhere between the bray of a donkey and the screech of a siren. Savannah hoped she wouldn’t be treated to Lolly’s belly laugh anytime soon, because she could only imagine the horror.

  “Let’s go.” Madeline waited just long enough to be sure Lolly was sitting and then screeched out of the driveway. Savannah grabbed her hair with one hand and her seat belt with the other.

  “We have to do this quick,” Madeline said. “Everybody listening?”

  “Aye aye, Captain.” Lolly gave a mock salute followed by another ear-shattering giggle.

  “Jordan and Simmons are in a faculty meeting until at least four o’clock, probably later. So we have until then. My uncle owns a seafood distributing business, and I know where he dumps all his waste until it’s picked up. We’re going to fill up the ice chest, then take it to their house. Savannah, you’ll go around back with a trash bag of fish heads and guts. There’s a hand shovel on the floor under my seat. See if you can bury what’s in your bag in their flower beds or better, flowerpots, if they have them. That way they’ll smell the fish in a day or two, but they won’t be able to figure out where the stench is coming from. At least not for a while. Lolly and I will hide the rest of it around the front porch. Agreed?”

  Savannah took a moment to put this together, but unfortunately she’d heard Madeline right. She struggled for something to say. “Like, isn’t that a bit extreme?”

  “It’s dead fish, not a nuclear bomb. But they’ll sure know they’ve been pranked.”

  Lolly didn’t seem surprised. “You afraid to get your hands dirty?”

  Savannah wondered if Madeline had shared the plan with her earlier. “Dirty, no. Smelly? Yuck!”

  Madeline made a right turn so quickly Savannah fell against the ice chest. “If you think it’s yucky,” Madeline said, “imagine what they’ll think.”

  Savannah was still trying to form what to say when they slowed in front of a warehouse near the Sponge Docks. Madeline screeched into a driveway that skirted the building, ending in an asphalt parking lot, and turned off the engine.

  “There are plastic bags in the ice chest,” she said. “You can use them like gloves. Scoop up whatever you can. Lolly and I will fill the ice chest, and, Savannah, you fill one of the two black trash bags, because you’re the one who will be carrying it. Take out the other trash bag and put it at your feet before you put the filled bag on top of it. I don’t want anything leaking in the car. Grab anything that looks disgusting enough to make somebody sick.”

  Savannah was feeling a little sick herself. Nothing anybody had done to her deserved this kind of payback. The assistant principal was probably required to report bad behavior, and maybe Mr. Jordan had cause to wonder why she was suddenly doing A quality work. This whole thing felt like some kind of initiation rite.

  “You with us or what?” Madeline stepped out of the car without waiting for an answer.

  “Yeah, but it’s sick.”

  “Absolutely. So get with it.” Madeline pulled back the seat, and Savannah climbed out. The next few minutes were hideous. Savannah loved seafood, but she wondered if that was about to change. They couldn’t reach anything in the small dumpster behind the building without climbing inside, but there was a heavy lidded can filled with waste beside it. Madeline said it was emptied into the dumpster at night.

  “There’s another on the side near the front door. Lolly and I will fill the ice chest from that one. Get busy.”

  Savannah tried not to gag as she removed the top of the can and scooped up fish waste and threw it into her bag. Even if the other two girls had been right there, nobody would have talked, because that required breathing.

  In a few minutes the chest and bag were back in the car and closed tight, but despite having double bags around her hands as she’d scooped, Savannah could still smell the disgusting odor of fish guts all over her.

  “I have wipes up here, but let’s wait until we’re done at the house. Then we can clean up and finish at my house. You can take a shower if you need to. Agreed?”

  Savannah felt too sick to talk. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the smell or the sense that she was sinking to a new level of depravity. She wondered what her father would think.

  Madeline knew exactly where she was going, and they arrived in less than ten minutes. The neighborhood was old, with pickups in driveways and dogs barking inside fences. They parked under a canopy of oak trees at the end of the block. The hedges between houses were tall, but the houses themselves were tiny. Luckily the lot across the street was vacant, which meant no one was there to watch them.

  “Okay, everybody out,” Madeline said, nodding to the house in front of them. “We don’t want neighbors to get interested in what we’re doing.”

  The chest was on the ground in moments. Madeline and Lolly each took a handle and hauled it toward the front porch, which was only a step above the sidewalk. They were flanked by trees, and Savannah was hopeful nobody would see them.

  “Savannah, grab your bag and go around back.”

  The other girls were already rooting around in the chest. Savannah grabbed the bag and hauled it around back, hoping it didn’t split open before she got there, because by now she was sure she wasn’t going to spread the contents. She was going to find a way or a place to get rid of the fish waste without opening it.

  Salvation, when it came, was in plain view beside the rear steps. A garbage can sat there waiting for her to dump her bag inside—tied tightly to disguise at least some of the smell—and head back around front.

  She did exactly that, shoving down the lid until the can looked as if it had been welded shut. Then she counted slowly to five hundred before she circled to the front of the house.

  The next moments ran together in her mind, like a television screen showing multiple programs at once. Slowly she registered that Madeline’s car was no longer in front of the house. In its place another car had just pulled in. Helia and Will jumped out of that one, a beat-up Ford with a dented passenger door. With visible alarm they surveyed the front yard, which Savannah hadn’t had time to do. Now she saw what they were gaping at and registered the fish waste scattered in plain view. Fish heads. Fishtails. Bones, slime. The mess was dribbled over the yard in a disgusting display.

  “Get inside,” Helia said, pointing at the car. Savannah realized the driver was Helia’s brother, who had been granted the right to spend time with his sister once again by her foster parents.

  “Where’s Madeline?” Savannah was bewildered. “Where’s Lolly? How did you find me?”

  Will grabbed her arm. “You have to get out of here. Now.”

  But Savannah was beginning to understand what had happened. Madeline and Lolly hadn’t brought her here to prank high school faculty. They’d done it to prank her. They’d seen how happy, how grateful she was to be Madeline’s new friend, and they’d probably thought that was hilarious.

  She didn’t pull away from Will. “They left me, didn’t they?” They’d probably left her the moment they’d dumped the contents of the ice chest on the lawn. They were counting on Savannah getting caught. There probably wasn’t even a faculty meeting today.

  A red sedan pulled into the driveway and her stomach sank as Miss Simmons got out and came to stand beside the three students. Helia’s brother remained behind the steering wheel of his car but didn’t drive off.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” She slapped her hands on her hips as Mr. Jordan came around to stand beside her.

  “You were that angry?” he said to Savannah. �
�You needed to get even this badly?”

  Savannah had been living on borrowed time at Coastal Winds, and it was nobody’s fault but hers. She had been expelled in New York for something she hadn’t done. Now she was about to be ousted in Florida for something she had. Revenge was not sweet; it was sickening. Nobody deserved this mess.

  “It wasn’t Savannah,” Will said, stepping forward. “She told me how upset she was at...at the way she was being treated. So I did this because...” This time he fumbled too long, trying to think of a good excuse. “Because I was trying to help her,” he finished.

  Savannah turned to stare at him. Will narrowed his eyes as if to say shut up and let me take the blame.

  He obviously thought he had a much better chance of surviving this fiasco than she did. But Savannah had never allowed anyone else to take the blame for her mistakes. It was time to reclaim that virtue, as insignificant as it seemed at the moment.

  She held up her hand. “Will and Helia just arrived. Somehow they figured out I was about to get into big trouble, and they were just trying to stop me.”

  She wondered how Will and Helia had known or suspected, but now was not the time to ask. “None of this was actually my idea, but I went along with it. I realized how stupid and mean the whole thing was, but I went along.”

  “It’s certainly both,” Miss Simmons said. “And you’re not out of trouble. Misconduct off the school grounds aimed at a faculty member can still be punished.”

  Savannah nodded.

  “What was the point?”

  “There was no point. It was pointless.” She looked up. “I’m sorry. And I mean that. I think I’ve been sorry since the minute I learned what was supposed to go down.”

  “Who talked you into this?”

  Savannah closed her eyes. “I can’t say. I’m sorry, but they’ll just deny it anyway. It doesn’t matter who had the idea. This is on me.”

  “It matters,” Miss Simmons said, but she didn’t pursue it.

  “I’ll clean this up with my bare hands, and then you can do whatever you want. There’s more fish waste behind the house in your trash can. I couldn’t make myself spread it, like I was supposed to. But you’ll want to get it out of there as fast as possible.”

  Miss Simmons turned to Will. “You shouldn’t have tried to lie for her.”

  He didn’t answer. She turned to Helia. “And what are you doing here?”

  Helia shrugged. “It was something to do.”

  Mr. Jordan stepped closer. “Helia, you might fool everybody else in the world, but you don’t fool me. Take yourself out of this. You and Will go and wait by the car.”

  Will hesitated, but Savannah touched his arm. “Go. And Will? I’m so sorry. For everything.”

  She waited until they’d both headed toward the street. “Please don’t punish them. They were trying to help me. I don’t know why—”

  “Frankly neither do I,” said Mr. Jordan. “Because you make helping you just about impossible. You’ve built a wall around yourself that’s a mile high. And those two climbed over it anyway, at their own risk.” He left to talk to Will and Helia.

  “I hate being me,” she said. “You have no idea how much I hate it!” And despite herself, she began to cry.

  “We know you’ve had a tough time this year,” Miss Simmons said, her voice gentler. “Things aren’t easy for you right now.”

  Savannah wiped her eyes. “It’s no excuse. I get that.”

  “I hope you see what real friendship looks like. I think I know who talked you into this. The girls you were apparently trying to be friends with are users. They’ve been in trouble before. They hurt people for fun. You aren’t the first.”

  Savannah remained silent.

  “I’ll call your stepmother and talk to her. She needs to be involved.”

  Savannah felt no pleasure. She would be yet another problem for Cassie to handle. And what good did that do either of them? More problems wouldn’t bring back her father. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes.

  “I’ll get you something from the house to clean this up,” Miss Simmons said. “Then I want you to go straight home. Will you do that?”

  Savannah wiped her eyes again. “Yes, thank you.”

  Surprisingly, after his wife went into the house, Mr. Jordan came over and touched her shoulder. Just the lightest touch to get her attention. “Was the quiz the thing that pushed you into this?”

  “My whole life is the thing.”

  “I’m sorry I questioned you this afternoon. But after the way you’ve behaved in class and your other test scores...”

  “I get it. It’s just... It’s hard to study, you know? It never used to be, but things are so different here.” She sniffed hard, because she was tired of crying.

  “Let Miss Simmons figure out what to do with you. But when she’s done, I want you to see me after school a couple of times a week to catch up. You could be one of my best students if you’d try.”

  Savannah couldn’t imagine that, but she nodded. “Can I ask Helia if she’ll wait while I clean up?”

  When he nodded, she went to face her friends, the ones who had come through for her. The two loners whose lives had been difficult for years and had still showed up anyway.

  16

  THIS YEAR CASSIE COULDN’T abide Christmas carols on the radio. While she’d grown up with Florida Christmases, getting reaccustomed to palm trees with colored lights and Santas in bathing suits and sunglasses was harder than she’d expected. Getting used to Christmas without her husband was hardest of all.

  The Westmore family had always celebrated the holidays in Manhattan with tourist-like enthusiasm. Over the years they had ice-skated in Central Park with snowflakes falling gently around them. They had watched the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, seen the Empire State Building dressed in red and green lights on the skyline and the Rockettes’ Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. At home they’d decorated a Fraser fir with ornaments she and Savannah made themselves, adding to the collection each year with new ones that grew more elaborate as Savannah grew older.

  She wasn’t sure the ornaments had made it to Tarpon Springs during the move. The garage was still lined with boxes, and when the one marked Christmas hadn’t leaped into her arms with a glad cry of reunion, she’d given up. Still, could they just ignore it?

  On Tuesday, after she delivered Will and Savannah to school, she sat at the kitchen table with Amber, drinking cups of freshly brewed coffee. They had already covered Amber’s week of training at the Kouzina. As approachable and competent as she was, she’d make good money in tips once she had all her hours. Especially with the tourist season taking off.

  Their morning coffee ritual had begun tentatively with plenty of opportunity to pull back. But a couple of mornings a week had increased to more. Whichever of them wasn’t doing car pool made a fresh pot to enjoy together when the driver returned. Although Cassie had never expected it, she and Amber had become more than each other’s captive audience, a bonus so new that she still didn’t know what to make of it. She just knew she looked forward to this chance to chat, as much as she could look forward to anything. Amber seemed to enjoy it, too.

  Now the conversation drifted to Christmas.

  Cassie was still trying to imagine how to celebrate with a sullen teenager who wanted to be anywhere except with her. She said as much.

  “Savannah went to school without a problem this morning?” Amber asked.

  “She did.” Cassie hoped Savannah had finally discovered that if she didn’t shape up, every day of her immediate future was going to be a nightmare she created herself.

  Amber helped herself to one of the kourabiedes that Savannah still refused to enjoy—as if a taste would be disloyal to her father. She licked the powdered sugar off her lips before she spoke. “Will thinks she’s really sorry for the thi
ngs she did. He believes her.”

  Cassie had learned most of the story of Savannah’s “prank” in bits and pieces, as well as the way poor Will had gotten involved. A girl named Helia, whom Cassie had yet to meet, had seen Will walking to his job and stopped to tell him Savannah was about to make a big mistake. Apparently they had accurately guessed where to find her, because Savannah had said something about getting even with the principal and her husband.

  “Will has such a good heart,” Cassie said. “Miss Simmons told me he tried to take the blame, but Savannah said no, it was her fault. And considering that when she got back home she smelled like something that had washed up on the beach, I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  “What happened to the other girls who were there?”

  This was the only part of the story that Cassie could repeat with enthusiasm. “Savannah refused to name them, but their identities were solved by the glories of technology. Miss Simmons and her husband have a doorbell with a camera. The other two girls were caught on it, and the school’s dealing with them now.”

  “Do you think seeing the guidance counselor will help?”

  Cassie and Savannah had spent an hour with the guidance counselor and the assistant principal working out the consequences of her behavior. After all the bad reports, the school was still willing to discuss and plan strategy together.

  In the end Miss Simmons had pronounced her verdict. Savannah would spend an hour after school every day for two weeks, beginning when winter vacation ended. Some of that time she’d spend with the guidance counselor. The rest she’d receive tutoring from the teachers whose classes she had routinely blown off.

  To her daughter’s credit, Savannah had accepted the decision without complaint. Maybe she really was trying to put everything behind her, and if her relationship with Will was evidence, maybe it was working. Last night they had sat together in the den, chatting as they watched television. She’d heard them talking as if they actually had things they needed to say.