Jala tells me her password, and I assure her I’ll only use her Facebook once. Then she can change her password.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jala says. “I trust you. Let me know what you find out!”
That is definitely an invitation to call her again.
We both say good-bye and I log into Jala’s account. It’s like just talking to Jala cured me of my stupid psychological reactions to Facebook. My stomach is perfectly calm. I am still using a fake identity, but I have permission. I am not breaking any rules, even silly ones.
Jala’s page comes up.
Jala has posted very little about herself: a profile picture that mostly just shows the side of her head, harmless comments like, “I’m starting at Ohio State tomorrow!” That was her most recent post. But of course she’s friends with Rosa and Stuart and Oscar and all our other mutual friends, and their posts are all over the place. Suddenly I really want to see the selves my friends present to the online world beyond Jala’s wall; I want to go to all their profile pages and study them in-depth. Are they the same people online as the ones I know in real life? Would I like them more or less? Would I know them better? Would I want to?
I know Jala wouldn’t mind me checking anybody else’s profile, and if I actually had a Facebook page of my own, of course all my DHS friends would friend me. But I don’t let myself sneak a peek at anyone. I’m only here to look for Whitney Court.
I type her name into the search engine.
Nothing comes up. There’s not even a wrong-person Whitney Court out there anywhere.
Are you serious? After all my effort . . .
I remember—belatedly—that if there’d been a Whitney Court RIP page, it would have shown up in the Google search. And, anyhow, even though I don’t know exactly when Whitney died, it must have been before Facebook. Facebook hasn’t been around that long. It just seems like it has.
It’s like you don’t even remember what Facebook’s like, I scold myself. Did you think Whitney’s family or friends would have set up an RIP page ten or twelve years after she died?
This reminds me to at least look for some of her friends and classmates. I start with Corey Wisner, Whitney’s fellow prom royalty and possible boyfriend. He shows up instantly, and I know it’s him because his profile says that he’s on his class’s fifteen-year Deskins High School reunion committee. And there’s a Facebook page set up for that.
Now we’re getting somewhere, I think.
I click over to that page, thinking I’ll send messages to anyone whose name I recognize from being in pictures with Whitney. I’ll have to say that they should send their replies to my e-mail address, not Jala’s Facebook, but . . .
There’s a lengthy post at the top of the reunion page:
To all current DHS seniors seeking information for the Whitney Court Scholarship: While we want to support our fellow Chargers, we all have jobs, families, etc., and really don’t have time to answer questions from three hundred different people in the course of a few weeks. So we’ve settled on a policy. I will answer questions from anyone writing specifically about me; Samantha Shreves will answer questions from anyone writing specifically about her; etc. But that’s all. We will have to ignore all other requests, no matter how witty, desperate, profound, or profane you make them. Good luck! (P.S. We are so glad college wasn’t as expensive back in our day! But some of us are getting kind of close to having to pay tuition for our own kids. . . . So you all can laugh at us in another five to ten years!)
It’s written by Corey Wisner. Evidently some of my classmates got to this page even before me. Corey’s answering them and everyone else, preemptively.
Great policy, I think. What am I supposed to do, since Whitney is dead? Am I going to have to change the person I write about?
I really don’t want to. It just seems like an essay about Whitney Court would automatically be the best one, the most poignant. Anyway, won’t the scholarship judges be impressed if I manage to succeed at the hardest assignment?
Now I just have to succeed.
Now and now and now
I work crazy-hard over the next few weeks. My AP physics teacher seems to think we should be able to solve even the problems that perplexed Albert Einstein himself, and the homework loads are challenging and huge in all my other classes too. One of my coworkers at Riggoli’s quits, and I pick up a lot of the extra shifts.
But what I work on the most is finding out about Whitney Court.
I go back to the yearbooks—now having to elbow my way into the room beside dozens of other seniors—and I look up the teachers at DHS back then. Two of them, Mr. Trencher and Mrs. Huggins, are still on staff, and I’m lucky enough to talk to both of them before they each post a sign on their classroom doors saying they’ve reached their quota of the maximum number of Court scholarship interviews they’re willing to do. Mr. Trencher’s sign includes a drawing of an earthworm and the words SEE? IT’S TRUE THAT THE EARLY BIRD GETS THE WORM! Mrs. Huggins’s sign includes a PS: MAYBE THIS WILL TEACH YOU NOT TO PROCRASTINATE THE NEXT TIME!
Both signs make Stuart furious. He missed out on interviewing either teacher.
“I bet there isn’t even a real scholarship attached to this,” he rants at lunch the day those signs go up. “I bet this is some psychology experiment, or a secret plot all the teachers are in on, trying to teach us we’re going to be competing for everything the rest of our lives.”
“It’s no different from teachers saying they can only write so many college recommendations every year,” Clarice points out. “Teachers only have so much time. They work hard. They have to draw the line somewhere.”
Clarice takes being a teacher’s pet to new heights. She forgets she’s allowed to turn it off at lunch.
“Ms. Stela told me lots of scholarships are strange,” I offer. “You can win money for making clothes out of duct tape or—”
“Don’t bother googling ‘weird scholarships,’ ” Stuart advises. “You can only get, like, a thousand dollars or so for any of those. This Whitney Court thing pretends to be about serious money, but it’s probably not.”
I’m debating whether to admit, “A thousand dollars sounds like serious money to me,” when Rosa leans into the conversation.
“Emily Riviera got a ten-thousand-dollar renewable scholarship from the Courts last year,” she says calmly. “It meant she was able to go to the University of Chicago. David Lin got a twelve-thousand-dollar scholarship the year before. He’s at Case Western.”
We all stare at her.
“What?” she says. “I checked around. And then I messaged both of them on Facebook to ask their strategies for winning.”
Stuart grabs her arm.
“So, spill,” he says. “Share everything. Help your friends.”
Rosa jerks her arm away, almost knocking over her milk.
“Oh, no,” she says. “Only one of us can win this thing. I’m not doing your work for you.”
Stuart slumps in exaggerated despair over his chicken nuggets.
“But I’ve got so much else I have to do . . . ,” he moans.
I decide to take pity on him. At least a little.
“If it makes you feel any better, my interviews with Mr. Trencher and Mrs. Huggins didn’t help much,” I say. “Mr. Trencher told me Whitney was really good at biology. Mrs. Huggins said she was really good at English.”
“Aha!” Stuart says, stroking his chin like some Sherlock Holmes in training. “So you chose Whitney Court herself as your essay subject?”
I hadn’t meant to reveal that.
“So?” I challenge.
Stuart continues massaging his chin. He just needs a pipe and one of those houndstooth-checked hats for the complete impression.
“It’s a little risky, don’t you think, choosing the dead girl?” he asks.
“If anyone can carry it off, Becca can,” Oscar says loyally.
I flash him a grateful look, then challenge Stuart. “Do you even know how she died?”
“No. Do you?” He challenges right back.
I shrug in a way that’s supposed to be mysterious. But the truth is, I don’t. I don’t even know when she died. I should have asked Mr. Trencher or Mrs. Huggins, but there was something a little . . . off . . . about both those conversations. It was like there was something they didn’t want to tell me, something they were afraid they might let slip by accident. Both of them seemed to put their guard up the minute I told them who I was writing about. I thought mentioning her death would just make everything worse.
How can I find out if anybody else is writing about Whitney, and if they’re doing any better than I am?
“Okay, let’s be fair,” Rosa says. “Becca just told who she’s doing. Everyone else, confess.”
I love having Rosa around.
It turns out that my idea to write about Whitney wasn’t obvious to anyone else. Oscar is writing about Brian Klontz, who was the president of the DHS computer club. Rosa is writing about Tanya Dodson, who organized a protest of military recruiting at the school. (Only two other people joined her.) Clarice is writing about Lacey Rice, who started four different service clubs. Stuart is writing about Cameron Craig, one of the other valedictorians with Whitney.
I start laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Clarice asks suspiciously.
“It’s like you’re all writing about yourselves!” I snort. “Or the person you would have been in Whitney’s class. . . .”
“You aren’t doing that,” Oscar points out. “You’re not a cheerleader.”
“Rah, rah, team! Goooo, Chargers!” I say mockingly, pumping my arms up and down and making goofy rolling motions with my fists.
I am covering.
Did I pick Whitney because she had the high school experience I wanted, the one I would have had if Daddy hadn’t gone to prison? I think. Not that I would have been a cheerleader necessarily, but . . . involved. At the center of everything.
A darker possibility occurs to me.
Or did I pick her because, if I don’t get this scholarship, my future could be doomed too?
• • •
I double down, work harder. After a ridiculous amount of cross-checking names and addresses and phone numbers, I find three retired teachers to talk to. One is in the process of moving to Florida and says the only thing she has time to tell me is, “Whitney was such a delightful girl in high school. She was a pleasure to teach, a spark plug in every class.”
There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the phone, and then she adds, “Really, that’s the only thing I’d have to say about Whitney, anyway. Good luck!”
And then she mutters something about the movers scratching her priceless antique cabinet, and hangs up.
The other two conversations are virtual repeats of my talks with Mrs. Huggins and Mr. Trencher. I now know that Whitney was also good at geometry and Spanish.
I still have the sense that the teachers I talked to were tiptoeing around something. Of course, I’m tiptoeing around something too.
Ask when and how she died, my brain commands me. Ask!
But I’ve messed myself up, linking Whitney’s post-high-school tragedy with my own future. I know she was still alive on graduation day, so her death wasn’t part of senior year. That means I won’t have to write about it. I don’t have to deal with it at all—do I?
The day after my last teacher interview, Rosa comes into sixth period and slaps two sets of stapled-together papers down on my desk.
“I don’t want to be depressed alone,” she says. “Read.”
I flip the papers over. They’re essays, one titled, “Julie Hanover,” by Emily Riviera, the other, “Mike Sellings,” by David Lin. I shoot Rosa a quizzical look.
“Yeah, they’re the winning essays from the Whitney Court Scholarship for last year and the year before,” Rosa tells me. “What can I say, I can be very persuasive on Facebook. I thought it would help. Not make me want to slit my wrists.”
“Because . . . ,” I begin.
Rosa points at the pages, and I obediently dip my head down and begin reading.
Julie Hanover and Mike Sellings aren’t even names I remember from the yearbooks—I never would have considered picking either one of them. But during her senior year Julie evidently had to deal with her five-year-old sister needing a heart transplant, and Emily Riviera’s writing makes me feel like I’m sitting right there in the hospital room, crying right along with the Hanover family. The essay about Mike Sellings is totally different—he apparently didn’t care about anything but cars, and the only way the teachers got him to pass senior year was by making everything automobile related: English essays, history papers, even math problems. He met his final science requirements with a special project on “Internal Combustion Engines I Have Known.” The essay is hilarious, but touching, too; it’s really a tribute to how much Mike’s teachers cared.
I look up.
“I feel like I now know Julie Hanover and Mike Sellings better than anyone in our class,” I tell Rosa. “Even the kids I’ve had practically every class with for the past three years. Even you.”
Rosa nods grimly.
“I know,” she groans. “I’ll never be able to write that well. I mean, Tanya Dodson was amazing, and I have some really great stuff, but when I write it down, it doesn’t go anywhere. And I just start thinking, I’m going to lose. I’m going to lose. I’m going to lose.”
Rosa is writing already? She’s done with all her research? I feel my panic level ratchet higher.
“Maybe Ms. Darien can help you,” I say. “She offered, remember? At least you have good information. The best thing I have is, ‘Whitney Court was a pleasure to teach.’ ” I make my voice wooden and dull, as lifeless as Whitney Court herself. “I can’t even find out where the Court family lived when she was in high school. Isn’t that ridiculous? And there’s no record of any Courts living around here now.”
“What, did the whole family leave Deskins after Whitney died?” Rosa asks. “Can you blame them?”
I shrug. Ms. Darien starts class before I can say anything else. But a few minutes later Rosa slips a piece of paper onto my desk with her familiar scrawl:
Whitney Court lived on Seldom Seen Road.
I give her a wide-eyed look, and she writes some more:
Tanya Dodson talked about going to parties out there.
I pull the paper toward me and start writing back:
Thank you!!!!! But—I thought you weren’t going to help anyone else?!?
Rosa writes back:
Us poor kids have to stick together.
Two hours later, I have an interview set up with Joann Congreves, a woman who, according to online property records, bought her house on Seldom Seen Road in 1982. She would have been the Courts’ neighbor the whole time they lived there, the whole time Whitney was growing up. And the best thing?
She’s promised to tell me everything.
A relieved now. And then . . .
“Whitney was always such a sweet girl,” Mrs. Congreves says. “Such a sweet, sweet girl.”
We’re sitting on her screened-in porch, overlooking what she’s already told me used to be the hill where all of Old Deskins’ kids (including Whitney!) would go sledding whenever there was snow. Sometimes it didn’t even take that—sometimes they just rode saucers and sleds downhill on frozen mud.
“Deskins wasn’t so stuck-up back then,” Mrs. Congreves says. She gestures toward the window and makes a face. “It wasn’t like that.”
“That” is an invading army of McMansions, row after row of oversize houses that have taken over the entire view. They dwarf whatever slope would have made the area a good sledding hill. Or maybe the developers flattened the hill when they built the whole neighborhood practically in Mrs. Congreves’s backyard. Really, none of the houses are any larger or showier than the one Mom and I left behind in Georgia, but three years of living in a tiny apartment has changed my perspective. Why would so many peo
ple need such enormous houses? I can see why Mrs. Congreves preferred looking out on a field full of laughing, playing children as they sledded in the wintertime, flew kites in the spring, set up bike-race courses in the summertime, or held pumpkin-rolling contests in the fall.
“If it hadn’t been for all those kids coming around, Seldom Seen Road really would have been seldom seen back then,” Mrs. Congreves says, even though she’s already told me that on the phone and when she greeted me at the door. I have a feeling it’s a line she uses a lot.
“Fifteen years ago it was just your house and the Courts out here, right?” I say. If I crane my neck a little, I can just barely see the corner of the sprawling ranch house where Whitney Court grew up. It’s about as big as some of the McMansions, but it looks homier, more comfortable. Less pretentious. Mrs. Congreves has already told me how Whitney used to stand out on the back patio practicing cheers and tennis serves, and I can almost picture it. But I don’t need to peer out the window watching for her family now: I’ve also learned that Whitney’s parents sold the place and moved to Cincinnati ten years ago.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Congreves says. “This whole area had a different feel to it back then. . . . It’s hard to imagine being so isolated now, isn’t it?”
She casts one last resentful glance out the window and stirs another spoonful of sugar into her glass of the iced tea she insisted on pouring for both of us. Mrs. Congreves seems to have a lot of nervous energy. She’s rocking her wicker chair pretty ferociously for someone who announced that she had her seventieth birthday last week.
She’s also told me her husband was an engineer, but he died of a heart attack four years ago; her daughters were six and eight years younger than Whitney, and they both went to Ohio State and now live in Dayton and Indianapolis; Mrs. Congreves herself has been getting over a bout of bronchitis and pneumonia, even though, yes, it is a bit strange to have those ailments this time of the year . . .
When she promised to tell me everything, I thought she meant everything about Whitney, not everything about everything.