Tell Me When You Feel Something, page 1
Penguin Teen
an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited
Published in hardcover by Penguin Teen, 2021
Text copyright © 2021 by Meg’s Cottage LTD
Text design by Talia Abramson
Cover design by Talia Abramson
Cover images: (girl) brusinski / Getty Images; (paper) MirageC / Getty Images; (texture) Ivan Gromov / Unsplash
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Tell me when you feel something / Vicki Grant.
Names: Grant, Vicki, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200213032 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200213075 | ISBN 9780735270091 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735270107 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8613.R367 T45 2021 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936851
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
For my dear friend, Leslie Gotfrit.
Brilliant, funny, creative, open-hearted—Les is truly more.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Davida Williamson
What Davida Didn’t Know
Davida
Why Tim Couldn’t Tell Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Tim
Viv
Davida
Viv
Tim
Davida
Viv
Tim
Viv
Viv
Davida
Viv
Tim
Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Tim
Viv
Viv
Viv
Davida
Viv
Viv
Tim
Viv
Davida
Viv
Viv
Viv
Viv
Davida
Viv
Tim
Viv
Davida
Viv
Davida
Viv
Viv
Tim
Viv
Viv
Davida
Viv
Viv
Tim
Viv
Tim
Viv
Tim
Viv
Viv
Davida
Davida
Davida
Davida
Your body does weird things. Bloats, bleeds, oozes, shrivels, itches, burns, freezes, plays dead, dies. You can be a perfectly normal specimen and you’re still a freak of nature.
And if that’s not bad enough, your body also lies. Your eye will lie to your head, your head will lie to your heart—and your heart?
It’s the biggest sleaze of all.
Davida Williamson
3 days after the party
11 a.m.
The cop is nice enough, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
He listens to what I have to say then props himself on the front of his desk and dangles one leg over the edge. It’s the standard just-having-a-little-chat pose of an adult trying to show he’s on your side. Principals love that one too.
I’m sitting in a plastic chair right in front of him. He’s too close. There’s this starburst of khaki crotch-wrinkles that’s basically staring me right in the face. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and presume he doesn’t realize it’s making me uncomfortable.
Viv says everything makes me uncomfortable.
“Look.” His eyes go big and sad. “A smart, talented, well-loved girl is in a coma. We all want to find someone to blame—but here’s the truth. Opioids don’t care who you are. They don’t care whether you’re an addict or a good kid who just goes out and does something stupid one night. Taking ‘party drugs’ these days is playing Russian roulette and, unfortunately, your friend was unlucky and took a bullet.”
Thanks. Like picturing her with all the tubes sticking out isn’t bad enough.
“I want you to know this though. We’re going to find out who supplied Vivienne with the drugs and prosecute him or her to the fullest extent of the law.” He makes a frowny closed-mouth smile and nods. He’s given his speech. He wants me to go now, and I should—this is useless—but I don’t. It took me days to get up the guts to come in. I’m not leaving now.
“No one ‘supplied’ her with the drugs. That’s what I’m saying.”
He puts both feet on the floor and tilts his chin down at me like I’m a little kid who’s said something cute. Cute but stupid. “Someone must have. She had to get them from somewhere.”
“No. Viv wouldn’t do that.” I say the words slowly, hitting the consonants hard. I need him to take me seriously. “Viv would not take drugs on purpose.”
“Were you at the party?” He knows I wasn’t. The police already interviewed everyone who was there. When they didn’t come to me, I realized I had to go to them. It’s the least I can do for my “friend.” (Viv gets quotation marks now. Little cartoony ones that flash in my brain as if they’re just another one of her jokes, which they aren’t.)
I shake my head but don’t break eye contact. Just because I wasn’t there doesn’t mean I don’t know.
Do I know?
Stop.
All he needs to think is I’m not sure—then he’ll never believe me.
“You saw the video though?” He walks back to the other side of his desk. “Or videos, I should say. Plural.”
“I saw one, but it didn’t prove anything.”
“No?” He sits down, grabs the edge of his desk and pulls his chair forward with a squeak. He looks at the computer screen through the bottom of his glasses. “Well, there were quite a few videos. Perhaps the one you saw was different. Multiple people recorded Vivienne taking a pill at the party. I’ve got it from at least six different angles.”
“That wasn’t a ‘pill.’ It was a vitamin.”
“Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but in the footage, we see Vivienne holding up a pill between two fingers and saying, ‘This is E.’ I presume by E she meant Ecstasy—or am I wrong?” He looks at me over his glasses and smiles. The long eyelashes surprise me. He must have hated them as a kid.
“No. She did mean Ecstasy—but that was a joke. She always says that.”
“Always?”
He’s doing that TV cop thing. Trying to trap me with my own words. “Okay, not always, but a lot. She takes vitamins with iron for anemia. We both do. We were at lunch once and someone asked her what the pill was and she went, ‘This is E,’ and the girl actually believed her.”
He doesn’t get how ridiculous that was, Viv and Ecstasy, so I tell him. “It was funny. She started saying it all the time, like it was her catchphrase or something.”
I shouldn’t have worn this sweater. I’m too hot all of a sudden.
“Her catchphrase,” he says.
“Yes.” I fold my arms so he can’t see and pinch my sleeves away from my armpits. I’d take the sweater off, but I’d have to pull it over my head and that would be weird, like I’m undressing or something. “She was just joking around.”
“Okay.” He pooches out his lips and shrugs.
I let that go. I mean, what am I going to say? He’s a cop. I’m some off-brand seventeen-year-old girl. Then I think, no. No chickening out. Viv wouldn’t chicken out.
I go, “Why are you saying it like that?”
“I just said okay.”
“Um. Well, not really. You actually said ‘okay-ay,’ which is kind of the opposite.”
He at least has the decency to laugh.
“Ask anyone,” I say. “Ask her boyfriend. She called it E all the time.”
“You’re talking about Jack Downey?” He picks up a paper clip and tumbles it through his fingers.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve met his mother. She’s the preacher at First African Baptist, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know the name of the church.”
He gives his head a little jiggle, as if details aren’t important. “He’s taking it pretty hard, I understand.” He opens his top drawer, drops in the paper clip and closes it again. “Jack is Vivienne’s ex, though, isn’t he? Not her boyfriend?”
“They had a fight,” I say. “Doesn’t necessarily make him her ex.”
He raises his eyebrows. A girl ends up in a coma after a fight with her boyfriend? The guy might not be her ex but he’s sure as hell a suspect. Even I know that.
I picture Jack and Viv, cross-legged on the green-and-black floor of the high school hallway, back to back, textbooks open on their knees, a big yellow clump of her hair hanging off his shoulder like a feather boa. The two of them totally quiet, totally focused, until the bell rings or one of their alarms sounds. Then they’re up, kissing, laughing, then kissing again and running off in opposite directions to some class, rehearsal, practice, game, meeting, whatever.
That was before Viv knew me of course—or, I guess, remembered me—but I knew her. Everyone knows Viv. Everyone knows how much Jack loves her.
“So what if they did have a fight? What difference does that make?” I say.
“Maybe none.” The cop wiggles a little breathing room between his neck and his clumpy beige tie. “But people do strange things when they’re under stress. Things they’d never normally do.”
“What are you saying? That Jack gave her the drugs? Just because he’s Black, you’re thinking—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He sticks his hand out like a traffic cop. “I was thinking no such thing. I wasn’t talking about Jack. I was talking about Vivienne doing something out of character.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“You think that could be it?”
“Viv doesn’t even drink,” I say.
“No?” Like that’s so hard to believe.
“Not at all.” It’s a well-known fact. “So who would go from, like, kombucha straight to Ecstasy, just because of some little argument?”
“People do it for less,” he says. “I’ve had girls tell me they took street drugs because they didn’t want to waste the calories on booze. Kids who’ve bought meth because they don’t have ID to buy beer.” He lays his glasses on the desk and rubs his eyes.
“But you saw the video. Everyone had alcohol. Viv could have gotten it if she wanted it.”
“True.” He puts his glasses back on. He drums his fingers on the desk. “So maybe she was more upset about the argument than people knew. Maybe she took the pill as a call for attention.”
The last thing Vivienne Braithwaite needed was attention. “She just won this big internship. Her father’s getting married and she’s a bridesmaid. She’s got a new little stepsister. Every guy who’s ever met her wants to, like, go out with her. She wouldn’t trash all that over some stupid argument.”
“What was the argument about?” He totally ignored everything I just said.
“I don’t know.”
“But it was something stupid?”
“Yes. I mean, I don’t know. Probably. They’ve been together since they were fourteen. They’ve no doubt had their, um, ups and downs. All couples do.”
As if I would know. I was a couple for roughly a nanosecond. Just long enough for one “up,” one “down” and an “over and out.”
“They do indeed…” He chuckles, then makes prayer hands and taps them against his chin. “One thing I don’t understand though. Why would Vivienne take a multivitamin at a party? Things have probably changed a bit since I was a teenager”—another chuckle—“but something about that doesn’t sit quite right.”
“You don’t know Viv.”
“True. I don’t. So help me. Taking vitamins in the middle of a party was normal behavior for her. That’s what you’re saying? You’d seen her do it before?”
“Not exactly. But stuff like that.”
“Such as?”
I try to come up with an example but all I can think of is Viv in the hospital, Viv in the van, Viv lying. Looking me straight in the face and lying.
I hold my breath and remind myself why I’m here. It doesn’t matter whether she’s good or bad. What matters is that somebody did something to her. I need the cop to believe me.
“I dunno,” I say. “Viv’s always super-busy. Work, lifeguarding, volunteer stuff, family stuff. Maybe that was just the first chance she had to take it.”
He picks up an elastic band and runs it through his fingers, squinting as if there’s something encoded on the rubber. “Any chance you know what kind of vitamins she took?”
“Same as me. IronPlus Multivitamins for Women.”
“What do they look like?”
“Bright pink, oval, about, I don’t know, this big…I can show you one if you want.”
He raises his hands like by all means.
I open my backpack. Dad twisted up some pills in plastic wrap and put them there at the beginning of the summer. He’s always been weirdly concerned about my iron count. He’s super-sensitive that he’ll miss some important girl thing, that I’ll somehow be horribly wounded growing up in an all-male family.
I hand him one. “She took these exact same pills.”
“Big suckers, aren’t they?”
“I’m used to them. I can swallow them dry, but Viv hates them. Always needs to wash them down with something.”
He holds the pill up like Exhibit A. “These were the only pills she took?”
“Least that I ever saw. She complained so much about them I doubt she’d take anything else for, like, fun.”
He hands me back the vitamin. “Would it upset you to see the video of the party again?”
I shake my head rather than lie outright.
“Here’s my problem.” He swivels his monitor around to show me. It’s not the exact video I saw but it was obviously taken at the same time because all the same people are there doing the same things.
“There was some drinking game going on here.” His finger circles a bunch of guys horsing around by the kitchen table. “That’s what people were interested in. Nobody seemed to be filming Vivienne on purpose. She just happened to be in the way. Now look here.”
He points to the area by the sink. “I’ll stop before the, ah…” He gives me a non-smile. We both know what he means. Viv losing it. Crumpling at the knees, eyes rolled back, spit bubbling out her mouth. The party going on around her while she convulses on the floor. Just another one of her jokes, until suddenly it isn’t.
I stare at the screen so the cop can’t read my face.
Ariana Cohen’s kitchen. Not that I’d recognize it, but everyone knows where the party was. The cupboards are all open, the granite countertop covered in red cups and beer bottles and bright yellow bags spewing barbecue chips. I can name a few of the kids in the video, but I doubt any of them could name me. Sam Fougere walks through the screen with his shirt off. Charlotte and Erica are in the corner and, judging by their faces, fighting about something. Patty Chu is sitting on the counter by the sink, Felix McSomething standing in front of her, his hands on her knees. In the background, Tommy G has Ollie in a headlock. In the center, the game of beer pong. Everyone is doing their Insta-best to look like they’re having an epic time. I was supposed to be there with Viv but, for obvious reasons, was not.
Someone scores and arms fly up. The cheering drowns out the music.
For a second, everything goes black. Then Viv’s waist-length volcano of kinky blond hair comes into focus. Whoever’s videotaping goes, “Hey. Out of the way!”
Viv goes, “Sorry,” and hunchbacks it over to the sink. She picks up a fresh bag of Doritos, squeezes it open, then pours a bunch into her mouth.
In this particular video, I can’t make out what she says but I’ve heard it before, so I know. She’s asking if there are any clean glasses.
Felix nudges a plastic cup toward her. “This one hasn’t been puked in. Like, recently.”
She makes a face and pushes it away. “Don’t need it that bad. I’m just popping a pill!”
Felix laughs. “Oh yeah, what? Special K? Kibbles ’n Bits?”
Viv goes, “Pah. None of that fancy brand-name stuff for me. This is E.” Then she holds up the pill, puts it in her mouth, twists her hair around her wrist, and drinks right from the tap.
Someone goes, “Chug, chug, chug, chug.”
