Secret for a Song by S. K. Falls Page B

creeping higher. Drew stirred in his seat.
I didn’t have the nerve to check on my abscess when he might wake up any moment,
though my fingers tingled with the need to pull down the neckline of my sweater.
I turned the CD off and his eyes fluttered open.
    “Tired?”
I asked.
    He
didn’t answer me, his mood still ruined from what had happened with the CD
player earlier.
    “We’re
here,” I said.
    He
pushed the eject button on the stereo, and grabbed his CD—this time without any
problems—when the thing spit it out. Opening the car door, he used his cane to
get out and stretched his legs in the snow-pregnant evening.
    I
followed him out.
    The
woman who answered the door was thin and bespectacled, with a head full of
crazy dark curls that stuck out every which way. I felt a pang of sympathy. I’d
thought my loose curls were bad, but hers were the tightly-wound, kinky kind
I’d always been secretly thankful I’d been spared.
    She
smiled when she saw Drew and me. “Hi. You must be Saylor. Zee’s told me all
about you. I’m Lenore, her mom. Thank you for getting her home safely the other
night. Come in, you two, get out of the cold.”
    We
followed her in, Drew dragging behind me. Zee was propped up on the living room
couch, watching a re-run of Santa Barbara, a soap opera with dramatic women
with big hair I remembered my mum watching when I was much younger.
    “How’re
you feeling?” I asked.
    She
rolled her eyes. “Fine, though Mom won’t let me so much as go take a leak
without badgering me about it.”
    “Language,”
her mother warned, but without much mettle. “And if you didn’t want me
badgering you, you shouldn’t have danced till you almost passed out.”
    “Mooooom.”
Zee threw her head back against the couch pillow, but I could see she didn’t
mind too much.
    Her
mother picked up a batch of laundry she’d been folding. “All right, all right.
I’ll let you visit with your friends. Holler if you need me.” And with a quick
pat on my arm, she bustled out.
    I
sat next to Zee on the couch and Drew took the chair next to me. “You look
better than the last time we saw you,” he said.
    “Just
needed to get on my oxygen for the night,” she replied. “It was still worth it,
though. Pierce is a hell of a dancer. Tell ya, if he wasn’t gay, I’d be all
over that like white on rice.”
    “Too
much information,” Drew said, but his voice was limper than usual.
    I
chuckled and let my head fall against the back of the couch. My eyes closed
without me asking them to.
    “Are
you okay?”
    I
forced them open again and found that Zee was staring at me. “Yeah. Fine.”
    “She’s
been sort of out of it since we left downtown,” Drew said. “Won’t say anything
to me, though.”
    “You
look like you might have a fever. I’d hold my hand up to your forehead, but my
hands are always cold now,” Zee said. “Drew. You do it.”
    I
felt my face heat up even more, and not from my fever. He bent over to me and
put the back of his enormous hand against my forehead. “Yeah, I’ll say that’s a
fever,” he said. His breath smelled like mint. “She needs some ibuprofen.”
    “Mom!”
Zee yelled, looking toward the doorway where her mom had disappeared minutes
before.
    “No,
really, don’t wor—”
    “MOM!”
    “What?
What is it?” Her mother came bustling back in, her face creased with worry.
“Are you okay? What do you need?”
    “Do
we have any ibuprofen for Saylor? She’s got a fever.”
    “No,
really, it’s okay,” I said again. I tried to lift my head off the couch, but it
felt like it was filled with lead. And it was beginning to hurt, as if it was
made from little splinters of glass.
    “You
don’t look so great, honey,” Lenore said. “Here, let me take your temperature.”
    I
closed my eyes and opened my mouth when I felt the cold nib of the thermometer
touch my bottom lip. When it beeped, someone took it out of my mouth.
    “101.5,”
I heard Lenore say. “Do you need