You Owe Me a Murder Page 2

  I shook my head and quickly wiped my eyes so she wouldn’t notice the tears. “No news.”

  The girl sighed. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. She tugged the thin cream cashmere sweater sleeves over her hands. She glanced down at the stack of paper on the chair next to me. “Your Times?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you read the article about the changes to the space program? I saw it earlier this morning.”

  I jumped slightly in surprise. She seemed like someone who would spot a copy of InStyle at a hundred meters but wouldn’t know a shuttle from a rocket if she were whacked across the face with one of them. “Uh-huh.” I picked up the paper, looking for the Science section.

  “I think that’s what I like about a real paper,” she said. “It’s like a knowledge Easter egg hunt. You never know what you’re going to find.”

  I nodded like a bobble-head doll. That was exactly why I loved reading a paper too. “Yeah. Are you into space stuff?”

  She shrugged. “Just find it interesting.”

  I held out my hand. “I’m Kim.”

  “Nicki.” She smiled as we shook. “How come you aren’t hanging with the rest of your group?” She motioned to a couple rows over. There were eight of us on the trip and we were all on this flight. A few had busted out cards to play a game on the blue carpeted floor, and the others were clustered around Jamal’s laptop checking out his music.

  “How did you know—​” I got out before she flicked the blue and white STUDENT SCHOLARS FOR CHANGE tag attached to my carry-on. I’d forgotten I was branded. “Ah. I’m not really friends with any of them. There are just three of us from my high school. It’s complicated,” I said.

  Nicki nodded. “Story of my life. I was here visiting my dad, and the reason he lives here, instead of in London with me and my mum, is all sorts of complicated too.”

  Nicki tucked her hair behind her ears. Her bob wasn’t quite long enough, so as soon as she did, the hair fell free and swung forward again. “Sorry, that came out a bit pissy. I just find other people . . . ugh. I don’t know. Disappointing.” She shoved her hair back again.

  “Story of my life,” I said, echoing her words. She laughed and it reminded me of scales on a piano.

  Nicki tapped the robotics magazine on my lap. “You plan on going into robotics at uni?”

  I shook my head. “Not sure. I’m leaning toward engineering, maybe computers.”

  She waited until an announcement about a flight to Phoenix stopped blaring on the PA. “I’m thinking psychology. I’m interested in research. This is my gap year.” She watched the unsupervised toddler fish a booger out of his nose and rub it into his hair.

  “What kind of research?”

  “Human behavior. I don’t have any interest in being a counselor. People blathering about their problems all day would drive me barmy. But I’m intrigued with why people do what they do, why they don’t do some things, what they could accomplish, that kind of thing.”

  I traced the pattern in the carpet with my shoe. Understanding other people was one of the great mysteries in my life. “If you ever figure people out, you’ll have to let me know what you discover. Math I can make sense of, but people are more confusing than quantum physics. Give me a robot any day.”

  She laughed. “Don’t give up on humanity just yet. Maybe you haven’t met anyone worth figuring out.”

  The overhead speaker chirped to life. “Attention: Passengers on Air Canada flight 854 to London. Due to aircraft maintenance issues, this flight will be further delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience.” The crowd groaned. The screen over our gate flickered and a new departure time, three hours from now, blinked on.

  Connor stood and stretched. “Who wants to find a place to watch the Whitecaps game?”

  Our group began to gather up their stuff. He was like the pied piper of nerdy people. Everyone was willing to follow him. Miriam walked over toward me.

  “Do you want to come?” she offered. Her legs were so small that her size extra small leggings were baggy around her thighs. She must buy her clothing in a kids’ department.

  “No thanks,” I managed to say, willing her to walk away. Or she could disappear completely—​I was open to that, too.

  “You can’t want to hang around here for the next three hours.” Miriam nudged my tote with her foot. “C’mon, we’ll all get some fries or something. It’ll be fun.”

  Fun wasn’t even in the top ten words that I would think of to describe the situation. “I’m fine,” I insisted. It was bad enough that Connor wanted nothing to do with me. It was worse that he started dating someone else right away. It was a nightmare that I was stuck on this trip with them. But her being nice to me was a layer of shit icing on this crap cupcake. I didn’t even know how much Connor had told her about what had happened between the two of us. I wasn’t sure what I preferred: that she knew and felt pity for me, or that he hadn’t told her anything because he didn’t think I was worth mentioning. I slouched lower in the seat.

  “Leave it—​she doesn’t want to come. Trust me, no one will miss her with that attitude.” Connor strode over and took Miriam’s hand without even glancing at me.

  I flushed. He was right. I was a walking black cloud of doom. I hadn’t bothered to get to know anyone else coming on the trip and now I was going to be miserable and alone.

  “Gawd, he’s a tosser,” Nicki said, loud enough to carry.

  I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant, but it sounded both hysterical and insulting. I burst out laughing.

  Connor and Miriam walked off down the hall, the rest of the group following behind them. He glanced over his shoulder at us, and when he saw we were still staring, he whirled back around.

  My chest filled with air. I felt like one of those large balloons at a parade—​ready to float away. “I don’t know what you said, but you’re my new favorite person on this planet,” I said. I meant it, too. My BFF couldn’t be reached except by letter. Emily might as well have been in space for all the help she could give me.

  “That guy is a loser.” Nicki pulled me from my seat. “I can tell, because as we’ve already established, I study people. You can pay me back for correctly identifying him as a wanker by keeping me entertained for the next few hours.”

  “How would you like me to do that?”

  Nicki’s smile spread across her face. “We’re smart women, we’ll think of something.”

  Two

  August 15

  16 Days Remaining

  Nicki stopped short outside the duty-free store, causing me to nearly slam into her back. She seemed entranced by the bright lights bouncing off a display of jewel-colored perfume bottles.

  “Let’s go in here,” she said.

  “They won’t have gum,” I noted. “There’s another store down just a bit further.” I pointed, but she’d already started to weave her way through the aisles. She randomly picked up items: a stuffed bear holding a satin heart, a giant Toblerone bar, and a box of washed-out pastel-colored saltwater taffy. She inspected each one as if she worked for quality control and then put each back down. I trailed after her.

  My mouth still burned from the jalapeños I’d had at lunch. Nicki claimed the best thing to eat before a big flight was huevos rancheros. She insisted the combination of protein from the eggs and cheese, along with the spice from the salsa, would ensure a good sleep on the plane. When I pointed out the entrée wasn’t on the menu, she’d raised one perfectly tweezed eyebrow. “Ordering off the menu is for the common person,” she’d declared. When the waiter came over, she turned on the charm, and before I’d known what was happening, he dropped off two custom plates just for us. And she was right—​the huge meal made me want a nap.

  Nicki grabbed a stuffed zebra and gave it a squeeze. “Things like this make me wish I had a kid brother or sister. Let me guess, you’re an only child too.”

  My mouth fell open. “How did you—​”

  “Only children are different. They have to amuse themselves growing up. They’re independent, better problem solvers. There’s tons of research on it. I could tell by the way you’ve been talking. You’re just like me.”

  Technically, I wasn’t just like her. I never knew what to say when people asked if I had any siblings. “About a half-dozen fully frozen” seemed too flip and required an explanation. Saying I was an only child felt like lying about the existence of my parents’ cryogenically suspended embryos. They were my brothers and sisters, just in cold storage in a medical lab.

  My parents hadn’t had an easy time getting pregnant. Thanks to the fact that my mom was an early blogger, the whole world knew about their struggles. Then after three rounds of IVF, I took. My mom called me MBK on her blog—​Miracle Baby Kim. She said she used the initials to protect my privacy, but how private could my life be when she plastered every one of my development milestones in cyberspace for the whole world to see?

  Somewhere on the Internet there’s a picture of me as a three-year-old, wearing a tiara and giant pink fuzzy slippers, sitting on the toilet with the caption “MBK Finally Masters Potty Training!” The “finally” is a nice touch; nothing I like better than people thinking I was delayed in the hygiene department. My mom’s name was all over her blog; it didn’t exactly take a Mensa-level IQ to figure out that I was MBK. The truth was, she didn’t care how I felt about the blog. What she cared about were all the people who read it and gave her nonstop “you’re the best mom ever” feedback.

  The year I turned ten, my mom wrote a long blog post where she announced to her legions of fans that she and my dad were officially giving up their efforts to have more children. They couldn’t keep up the nonstop cycles of IVF. It seemed Mother Nature didn’t have it in the plan
s for my mom to be the mother she wanted to be, with a minivan and the ability to construct something out of Legos while simultaneously preparing an organic dinner for her large happy family. And while she wanted to focus on her blessing (Beautiful MBK!), she could still grieve for what could have been and she would always see those frozen embryos as her babies. The Huffington Post picked up that blog post and ran it on their site. It’s one of their most downloaded pieces. They rerun it on Mother’s Day most years.

  It was around that time that I started to become aware that I was a disappointment to my mom. When she’d imagined having children, none of them were like me. She wanted a daughter who liked to play with dolls and whom she’d punish with a wag of her finger, all while smiling at how adorable it was that I stole her makeup. My desire for tangle-free short hair and passion for books and blanket forts befuddled her. Why didn’t I want to skip rope outside with the other girls? Why didn’t I let her braid my hair into complicated patterns befitting a Disney princess? Why wasn’t I similar to her at all? How could she be a mothering expert when her own kid was so . . . awkward?

  My mom was one of the first mommy bloggers. Thousands of people still read her site daily. They comment on her recipes (Super YUM Crock-Pot Meals!) and reviews of baby items (Bugaboo Strollers Worth Every Penny!). She’s blogged about how motherhood is hard and disappointing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. I can’t be the only one who realizes that she’s trying to talk herself into that fact. I believe that my mom loves me, I just don’t think she likes me. If she’d had more kids, maybe it would have made a difference. I guess neither of us will ever know.

  Nicki sniffed a bottle of Burberry Brit perfume and then spritzed a tiny bit on her wrist. She held out her arm for me and I leaned in.

  “Nice,” I said, but she’d already moved on to the next display.

  She stared up at the tower of Grey Goose vodka. “Want some for the flight?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t think even you can talk this place into selling us booze.”

  Nicki winked and I noticed she was wearing a hint of a shimmery eye shadow. “Who says they’re going to sell it?”

  My heart picked up speed. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure we were alone. “You’re going to steal it?” I asked, lowering my voice. My heart rabbited into overdrive.

  “No, we’re going to steal it,” she said, her light brown eyes sparkling. “No one ever suspects the nicely dressed girl with a British accent. They think I’m too posh to sink to thievery.”

  A swarm of spastic butterflies tried to take flight inside my lungs. I was pretty sure I didn’t look too posh to be arrested. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Up to you.”

  The chatter from the two clerks at the front of the store as they debated the merits of Ryan Reynolds seemed unnaturally loud to my ears. I bit the inside of my cheek. “What happens if we get caught?”

  Nicki’s lips curled up, Grinch-like. “Bad things. That’s why we’ll do it so we don’t get caught.” Her head tilted slightly toward the bottles of booze. “They haven’t put on the plastic antitheft devices yet, and I don’t see any cameras.”

  She was right. Every other bottle in the store had a black plastic disk attached around the neck, but the display of Grey Goose was naked. I could almost hear the angel and devil perched on my shoulders. One advising me to do the right thing and go on to the next store and buy a pack of Trident like a good girl, and the other telling me that it wouldn’t kill me to take a risk now and then. Where had playing it safe gotten me? I wanted to be someone else, anyone else. Maybe if I wanted to change the course of my life I needed to change the things I did. Be someone who did daring things, like Nicki.

  “What do we do?” I whispered.

  Nicki poked my leather tote bag. “When it’s time, grab the closest bottle and drop it in.”

  “How will I know it’s time?”

  She tapped me on the nose. “You’ll know because you’re smart.” She turned back to the perfume display and grabbed a small bottle. “I’m going to check the price—​my mom loves this stuff.” She’d taken only a few steps when her foot hooked into the handles of a brightly colored canvas bag stamped with a maple leaf and the words CANADA FOREVER, sitting on the floor among other similar bags.

  I opened my mouth to warn her, but she’d already jerked forward with a loud oomph. Her arms flew up as she fell and the bottle of perfume collided with the ground with a brittle smash. A cloud of a citrus and musk scent filled the air. The clerks flew to her side.

  I was about to do the same when I realized this was it. My hand jerked out as if it were under the authority of another force and yanked a bottle of vodka off the display, plopping it into my tote. I jammed my elbow over the top of the bag to pinch it shut and hustled to where Nicki was now standing between the two clerks. My heart beat out of control.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, surprised that my voice didn’t crack with the electric tension filling every inch of my body, zapping down my nerves, lighting me up from the inside.

  “I’m okay. I think.” Nicki looked down at the broken glass on the floor and her eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “You’ll have to pay for the perfume.” The tall clerk pointed to a YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT sign by the entrance.

  Nicki drew herself even straighter. “But I wasn’t being careless. I tripped on your bags, which were all over the floor.”

  The mouth on the tall clerk pressed into a tight line, like a slash across her face. “If you don’t pay for it, we have to call a manager.”

  Panic flashed like a bright white light. I had to do something. I kicked the canvas bags now strewn across the floor. “You should call a supervisor. Maybe if you hadn’t been so busy talking, and instead had straightened up this mess, it wouldn’t have happened at all. You know, if she’s hurt, you’re liable. My dad’s a lawyer—​he deals with this stuff all the time.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to swallow them back down. I hoped I was right. My dad was a dentist. Any legal knowledge I had was from watching The People’s Court when I stayed home sick from school. What had I done?

  Nicki’s lip twitched. “Now that I think about it, my back is quite sore. I hit the floor pretty hard.” She rubbed the base of her spine.

  The tall clerk looked ready to clobber Nicki, but the shorter woman with her hair tied up in a mountain of tiny braids put her hand lightly on the arm of the other. “We’re certainly sorry you fell.”

  Nicki met her gaze. “And I’m sorry that the bottle broke.”

  The short clerk smiled, her white teeth as bright as the wall tiles. “Well then, why don’t we just decide that no harm’s been done?” The tension that had been coiling inside me released.

  “Are you sure?” Nicki asked. Her eyes were so wide, she looked like an anime character. When the clerk nodded, Nicki reached for me. “We should get back; our flight will be leaving soon.”

  I nodded solemnly as if I were very concerned about timeliness. Every muscle in my body clenched as I walked over the threshold, anticipating a piercing alarm going off, but nothing happened. Nicki gripped my elbow. “Don’t look back. Only guilty people look behind them.”

  My neck stiffened and I kept moving forward down the hall. The adrenaline that had rushed through my system seconds ago was now bailing ship and I felt lightheaded. My bag weighed a hundred pounds. I half expected every person we passed to develop x-ray vision, see through my tote, and point me out as a shoplifter. Nicki seemed to sense I was barely holding it together, and she pulled me along until we reached an empty gate area. We both started giggling as we dropped into a row of seats.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” I said. I opened the bag expecting the vodka to be missing, a figment of my imagination, but the bottle was there. I glanced quickly at Nicki to see if she was impressed that I’d actually done it.

  “Since we’re headed to England it would have been more fitting to have nicked some gin, but a girl has to work with the opportunities she’s got.” Nicki patted the side of my leather bag. “You were perfect. When you said that line about how I could sue them, I wanted to cheer.”