Free Rosebush by Michele Jaffe Page A

could tell she was watching me closely.
    “Kneeling? In the street?”
    “Yes. Do you have any idea why you would have been doing that?”
    I was stunned. “No. I have—no.”
    “There are generally only two explanations for that kind of behavior. Either the person is trying to kill themselves—”
    “I told you I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
    “—or the person’s on drugs.” She let that sink in for a moment, then leaned forward, inviting confidences. “Did you take anything?”
    “No.”
    She studied me as though assessing whether I was telling the truth or not and gave a small nod. “Did you eat or drink anything at the party that could have been drugged?”
    I had to think about that longer.
    I’m in the music room with David and Ollie. I’m sitting on David’s lap. I’m—
    I’m holding a drink.
    But where did it come from? I’ve got nothing. No memory.
    “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t remember.”
    This time she looked at me like she wasn’t sure she believed me. She closed her notebook and stood up, sliding a business card on the table next to my bed. “Here’s how to reach me if you recall anything else.”
    You should have died, bitch.
    The full impact of what she was getting at suddenly hit me. “Do you really think that someone might have drugged me on purpose? To—to hurt me? That this wasn’t an accident but someone out to get me?”
    “I don’t think anything yet. We’re investigating. Your being drugged could be unrelated to what happened,” she said. She was watching me closely. Something distrustful, maybe mocking, in her expression reminded me of my friend Bonnie from Illinois.
    “But if that’s true, then it was someone at the party,” I said. “One of my friends. Why would one of my friends want to hurt me?”
    “Only you can answer that question, Jane.” Her gaze moved toward the new bouquet. “Lilies, tulips, hydrangeas. Lovely and expensive. You have a generous boyfriend.”
    “They’re not from my boyfriend, they’re from his best friend,” I corrected.
    “Ah.” She tapped her card with a ragged fingernail and went to the door. “Call me if anything occurs to you.”

Chapter 8
    Her words, that mocking glance seemed to linger in the air like the heavy perfume of Ollie’s flowers even after the door clicked closed. Friends didn’t try to hurt you, I wanted to shout after her. Friends protected you from being hurt. If you had friends, you were never alone. And I had friends. Dozens of them. I tried to look at all the flowers on the windowsill, but my eyes drifted beyond them to the sliver of sky above. It was bright blue with a lone cloud floating through it. Perfect weather for a ditch day.
    Langley and Kate and I had planned to spend it at the Livingston Country Club working on our base tans. I closed my eyes now and the whirring of the machines around me became the humming of cicadas in the flowering bushes that surrounded the pool. It was punctuated by the soft thwack of tennis balls and the tinkling of glasses as the staff conveyed carts filled with tableware from the dining room to the pool pavilion to set up for the annual Memorial Day dinner dance that night.
    I should have been there, stretched out on a lounge, critiquing everyone’s new bikinis, drinking iced tea, and picking on a Cobb salad. I should have been there with them and not here, alone, surrounded by machines, unable to move, my body bruised, my face not my face.
    Why would one of my friends want to hurt me?
    Only you know the answer to that.
    I didn’t have any answers. Just unanswered questions and huge blank spaces in my mind, blank spaces so big I felt like I could drown in them. I was alone, and lost, and free falling. Once, developing negatives during photography camp the past summer, I’d had the feeling that my world was slipping away from me, like I didn’t know which way was up. I felt that way now so strongly I could almost smell the pine trees. I closed my eyes