And faced almost the entire swim team, everyone who wasn't in the pool, shivering in an arc around me.
Without meeting their eyes I edged past them against the wall of the building and headed for the locker room.
"Go with her," Doug said quietly.
I didn't turn around to see who he was talking to. It didn't matter anyway. Inside the locker room, I wound my combination lock with fingers shaking from sudden cold. When I turned with my clothes, Lila was standing there with a towel tight around her and her arms folded to keep it in place, scowling at me, staring me down without a word. Lila or Keke or Stephanie, it was all the same. Everyone knew about my mother now.
We both jerked our heads at what we couldn't see: Doug shouting somewhere in the hall between the women's and men's locker rooms. "Brandon, get the f**k over yourself." And then, "Great timing, motherfucker."
Doctors could keep brain-dead patients alive on heart-lung machines. If they could also get those brain-dead folks up walking, talking, and driving to the produce stand for a pineapple smoothie, that would be me. I was aware of what was going on around me, but my brain had shut down, and zombie Zoey did not have any reaction to Doug Fox calling her alleged boyfriend a motherfucker. I pulled off my goggles and swim cap and hung them from the top hooks in my locker. Quickly combed out my damp, tangled hair. Dressed and walked past Lila still glowering at me, out to the pool.
This time Brandon met me at the door. Really, I didn't want a hug from him either, but he took up the whole doorway, and pushing past him might cause a fuss. I walked right into the front of him. He folded me in his huge arms.
Over his shoulder, Doug leaned on his crutches, watching me. Or watching Brandon, making sure he didn't get away from me. I'd hugged Brandon and helped him through countless affairs all summer. I'd always listened, never complained. Once he woke me up in the middle of the night, calling me to whine about woman trouble, drunk. I'd spoken soothingly to him, not because I had a crush on him then--I didn't--but because I'd cared about him.
And now I suspected Doug had to yell at Brandon to get him to hug me.
This was how it would be with people from now on, now that they knew about my mother.
I counted to ten because that seemed like a long enough hug, then pulled back and smiled up at Brandon. "Thanks so much for coming. Maybe I'll see you later."
He put one big hand back through his golden hair. "Call me anytime," he told me. As if this were not an automatic privilege of being his girlfriend. As if he were doing me a favor.
I walked past him to march between the pool and the bleachers, running this gauntlet one last time. Keke's heat was over, and now she stood shivering with the rest of the team. She and Lila might not be identical twins, but their outraged glower was amazingly similar. I kept my eyes on the gate ahead of me.
Outside the gate, I saw for the first time that the sun had set. My mom and Officer Fox sat on a low wall around a palm tree in front of the school, illuminated by the parking lot floodlights. I couldn't hear what they said at this distance, but they seemed to be chatting casually. Officer Fox's feet were far apart on the ground, his hands on his knees. Just as I would expect Officer Fox to sit on a planter. My mom should have crossed her legs elegantly in front of her, or even refused to sit on a cement wall. But her knees were tucked to her chest with her arms around them, in the fetal position. If she started rocking back and forth before I reached her, I was headed right back to the bathroom to throw up.
The gate clanged behind me like the bars of a jail sliding shut. "Zoey," Doug called.
I stopped and turned to face him.
"Y ride in the police car with your mom," he said. "My brother will bring you home."
I shook my head. "That's not the plan. I'm driving her. Y brother said I could drive her."
our
"Y are not driving to Fort Walton when you just passed out in the bathroom," Doug informed me.
"I wouldn't drive if I wasn't okay to drive. What do you think I am, crazy?" I walked to the planter, watching my mom carefully for rocking. "Let's go."
I didn't look back to see whether she followed me. Officer Fox was there to Taser her if she resisted. But I heard her footfalls crunching the sand that covered everything here, even the concrete parking lot. Her footfalls stopped at the back of the Benz. "Where's your car?" she asked.
"I totaled it."
No reaction. None. Next she asked in a monotone, "Where's your father?" Of course she wouldn't remember that he was in Hawaii, marrying his pregnant mistress. My mother was crazy.
"Away on business." I hit the button to unlock the doors of the Benz, and we slipped inside. As I pulled from the parking lot onto the road, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Officer Fox's patrol car with Doug in the passenger seat, following me closely.
I headed north and took the highway that hugged the bay, the fastest way to Fort Walton from here. There was absolutely nothing to see--just the patch of highway visible under the headlights, fading into an impenetrable tangle of plants with sharp tips and briars on either side of the road. If I'd turned the wrong way, east toward Panama City, I wouldn't have been able to tell. It all looked the same.
"Y realize what you are?" I burst.
No reaction. She sat as she had the whole drive, staring out the window into the scrubby wilderness, hands rubbing her thighs slowly like her palms were sweating and she needed to dry them before shaking another lawyer's hand in court.
"Y ou're an escapee from the loony bin," I said. "Y ou're the butt of every joke ever told. Y might as well be the chicken that crossed the road."
"It's a chemical imbalance," she whispered to the window.
"Right. And you poured your chemical imbalance into an Erlenmeyer flask, shook it up"--I bobbed my hand violently to show her--"and spewed it all over my school!" My arms circled as wide as the explosion. One part of me felt so, so guilty for saying this to her. I couldn't stop myself. Anger was a million times better than panic.
She didn't move. She didn't speak. But when I glanced over at her again, the tracks of tears down her cheeks glimmered in the glow from the dashboard of the Benz.
I HALF EXPECTED MY MOM TO bolt toward the forest surrounding the low mental hospital building and disappear into the palmettos. Officer Fox would dash after her. My mom would prove surprisingly elusive and they would pick her up a few days later walking along the highway, legs torn to shreds by the unforgiving Florida woods, arms thrust through holes she'd poked in a garbage bag like it was the latest fashion in outerwear, eyes vacant. This time there would be a photo in the newspaper.