What Janie Saw by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

best friend.
    Reeve too had texted. He attended college in Boston, and communicated with Janie so often she felt as if she entered all his classrooms at his side, as if she too decided against doing laundry and gave most of her attention to the next meal.
Miss you
, he had written.
Coming home for the weekend
.
    Reeve was perfect. At least, he had been perfect, until he revealed a large imperfection. He’d gotten a talk show slot at his college radio station and used Janie’s personal life as a soap opera story to narrate night after night to the city of Boston. When Janie found out, she didn’t kill him, mainly because there was no opportunity. Reeve had spent a year trying to make up for his actions, and she usually told him he was halfway there.
    “I don’t want to be half a boyfriend,” he would tell her, his brown spaniel eyes pleading.
    She would smile halfway. “Selling me out reduced us to half, Reeve, and here we stand. Half of what we were.”
    Sarah-Charlotte said Janie needed to get over it. “Reeve adores you. He’s said he’s sorry a hundred times. He can’t sell you out on the air again even if he wants to, because the college can’t afford the station anymore and it folded. But the key point is, where will you ever find a boy as good as Reeve again?”
    It was a problem. Boys as good as Reeve were rare.
    On the other hand, boys as rotten as Reeve were rare. So for her senior year, Janie was traveling with a crowd. She had not attached herself to any boy in particular, and when asked about Reeve, she would say, “We’re still half interested in each other. We’ll probably spend half our vacations together being half in love.”
    Nobody knew what that meant, and neither did Janie, but it hid the fact that her heart remained broken. Reeve had been with her every step of the milk carton nightmare. He had held her, comforted her, driven her anywhere she asked in his Jeep. And yet knowing her agony had not prevented him from capitalizing on it.
    On the car radio, another song began.
    Janie hadn’t been listening to the DJ’s announcements, but the band was recognizable from its intro.
    Visionary Assassins were a classic case of a garage band going from two listeners to twenty million overnight. They were a particular hit with youngerkids. Parents and talk show hosts expressed concern over whether Visionary Assassins were appropriate for innocent children.
    Their opening measures were always a throbbing, headachy collection of percussion. Deep, angry beats like oncoming trucks.
    And then Visionary Assassins’ intro was over. The melody and the words began.
    Janie’s chest became a hideous messy whirl, as if her heart and lungs had been thrown into a blender.
    No
, she thought.
    No!
    Two thousand miles away, the woman formerly known as Hannah entered a motel room. She had cleaned five of the sixteen rooms assigned to her. This one stank of grease and sausage. The occupants had left pizza boxes and crusts all over the place. As for the bathroom, it was disgusting. How could anybody create this much mess in one night? Of course no tip lay on a counter to make up for it.
    Hot, buzzing rage seized the woman. Scrubbing bathrooms was not her destiny! It was that girl’s fault. That girl had butted in and destroyed everything, and no matter how many years passed, nothing got better.
    The woman yanked on a new pair of disposable gloves. Everybody else in housekeeping wore gloves to protect their hands from rough cleaning fluidsand filth. Hannah wore them so she wouldn’t leave fingerprints.
    She turned on the radio for company and considered finishing off the cold pizza remains, ignoring the tooth marks of strangers. But she couldn’t risk the supervisor seeing her forage like a dog.
    They had already had difficulties at the morning meeting. She used a different name wherever she went and had forgotten the name she was using at this job. “Evelyn,” the head housekeeper kept saying. Evelyn didn’t